In a recent interview, Tool guitarist Adam Jones seemed excited to revisit the band's "difficult" writing process. Recalling the thrill that comes from overcoming such difficulties, he parroted, "Let's do it again!"

The delighted admission came when the musician got down to brass tacks about the real reasons behind Fear Inoculum's long wait. The band's fifth studio album, released last month, took 13 years to emerge following 2006's 10,000 Days. While a long list of reasons have been theorized regarding the delay, the guitarist helped to clarify how the band's members ultimately got over that hump.

"It really comes down to having the communication, discipline and respect to believe in the other person when you might not necessarily believe in what they're bringing in," Jones told Guitar World Monday (Sept. 16). "It's obviously hard for us to get to the end result sometimes, but it's that thing where you do something difficult and sometimes you hate it, but when it's done, you're like, 'Let's do it again!'"

But that's not all. The guitarist went much further in discussing the new album.

Touching back on the fact that Fear Inoculum's "7empest" contains an early riff from Tool's Justin Chancellor — one that "probably" pre-dates the bassist joining the band in 1995 — Jones described what happens when the band's three instrumentalists first start working together. That includes revisiting older material.

"The three of us meet, we start throwing riffs around and tearing them apart, we revisit things we wrote a long time ago that may work with the new stuff," the guitarist explained. "It's really about finding your roots again and remembering why you started in the first place, finding the fire that burned in you when you started, and not letting success distract you. We still really try to be true to our art form."

For fellow guitarists, Jones also delved deep into some of his techniques elsewhere in the interview. Highlighting the "rhythms and polyrhythms" that revolved around the number 7 on the new album, the guitarist addressed everything from guitar pickups ("I still use just the original Seymour Duncan Super Distortion pickups") to his signature left-handed strum/pull-off technique: "I did that early on with Tool and you hear it in a lot of our tunes. I see kids do that song on YouTube and they're usually playing it wrong."

Talking further about Tool's arduous compositional affairs, Jones added, "The writing process can be magical and rewarding, or it can be the worst thing in the world and you want to kill the other person."