Let’s just get this out of the way: Maynard James Keenan is tired of people asking about Tool’s next album.

The progressive metal band’s last record, “10,000 Days,” was released in 2006, yet there are rumblings that something new is on the horizon. Keenan, though, would like antsy fans and followers to take a cue from a 2001 Tool song: Be patient.

“I really love Led Zeppelin, and it’s a shame they’re not making more records, more records. But I got up this morning without any problem,” Keenan says. “We’re working on it. ... Do I appear to you to be a lazy person who doesn’t want to get that done?”

Anyone with familiar with Keenan’s work with Tool and beyond would know that he is, in fact, not lazy at all. At age 52, the rocker owns the Caduceus Cellars winery in Jerome, Ariz., and he is one of the main creative forces in the art-rock supergroup A Perfect Circle and the gonzo musical collective Puscifer. This week, Keenan and author Sarah Jensen will publish a book, “A Perfect Union of Contrary Things,” which offers a more intimate look into the otherwise-enigmatic singer’s life than fans are used to.

The book describes how Keenan honed his discipline and patience during his years wrestling and running cross country in high school, and then during his stint in the military during the early 1980s. Today, at age 52, he strives to apply these characteristics to how he does everything from overseeing his wine business to making music.

“If the fruit’s not ready, I can’t pick it,” he says. “If it’s not ready I move on to something else.”

Aside from biographical insights and details about Keenan’s creative evolution, the book delves into Keenan’s life as a businessman and entrepreneur. In the late 1980s, before he would help form Tool in Los Angeles, he discovered he had a knack for arranging merchandise displays at a pet-supply store in Boston. “It was like a living, moving sculpture in the form of a pet store,” he says in the book.

It seems unlikely that someone would be able to translate that experience into a music career, but it helped him limit some of the excesses of a rock-star lifestyle. Not that he didn’t indulge in certain vices, as the book explains, but he was able to maintain the kind of focus that turned him into a cross-cultural multitasker.

“I think of it more about organization, just being able to start a thing and see it through,” he says. “Managing, I suppose. I would be a really good manager, a store manager.”

He understands his limits as a businessman, though. For instance, he admits that his strength is in managing ideas and organizing the business, and that delegation is important. For instance, Keenan says, when it comes to the grapes, his life is in vineyard manager Chris Turner’s hands.

“Delegate, delgate, delegate,” Keenan says. “You cannot get this done alone. You have to delegate.”

Maynard James Keenan, second from right, with Gene Simmons of Kiss, far left, and members of Nelson. Photo: Lindsay Brice

His trust in others to do important work allows Keenan to tend to other fruit, so to speak. For instance, while the world waits for a new Tool album, Keenan is eager for a point-of-sale software system that can handle both wine-tasting room bills and restaurant bills. “No one has connected the two. It’s low-hanging fruit. Somebody do that, please,” he says with a laugh.

Yet when it comes to the nitty-gritty of the technology it takes to run businesses, though, Keenan is – again -- pleased to defer.

“I have good people on staff who are a little more wired for those things, and I go, 'F--- it, I'm out of here. You deal with it,'” he says, laughing again. “Hands up in the air, walking out the door. ‘I'm going to go have a coffee. Let me know when it's fixed.’”