Puscifer released Conditions of My Parole in the United States on October 18, 2011. Their second studio album grew out of sessions in Jerome, Arizona, where Maynard James Keenan, Mat Mitchell and Josh Eustis produced the record, with tracking taking place among the wine barrels at Keenan’s Caduceus Cellars. The setting gave the musicians a base that their first album had lacked.
Keenan explained the difference in a December 2011 interview with the Dallas Observer. The debut, V Is for Vagina, had been assembled during a hectic stretch, with recording scattered across studios, hotel rooms and dressing rooms. Its follow-up was largely made in a single location. Instead of fitting every session around travel, the collaborators could develop the record from the same place.
Arizona also supplied part of its personality. In the album’s release announcement, Keenan pointed to the Verde Valley’s collision of cowboys, artists, political differences and desert wildlife. He compared the surroundings to “Twilight Zone,” “Mayberry” and “Road Warrior.” That mixture of the familiar and the bizarre suited the title track’s dark comedy, which extended into an official video co-directed by Mike King, Flea Circus Films and Puscifer.
The music developed through experiments rather than a plan to cover particular genres. Keenan told the Dallas Observer that he would sketch an idea, then work with Mitchell and Eustis to find what belonged in it. His interest in the banjo, for example, prompted them to explore its possibilities in “Tiny Monsters.” Asked about a critic’s description of the album, he offered his own simpler term: “comfort food.”
Carina Round became an important part of those arrangements after an introduction that began with her solo work. In a 2012 interview with Loudwire, she recalled that Mitchell had seen her perform and remembered her. When singer Juliette Commagere could not make a Puscifer tour, Keenan contacted Round. She traveled to his Arizona home to meet him and try working together.
Recording their vocal parts involved more than standing beside one another and singing a duet. Round described the musicians working in separate corners during the Arizona sessions. Keenan sometimes proposed several harmonies, which could then be combined in different ways. Mitchell edited her performances into arrangements that differed from what she had originally sung. Round also stressed the importance of Mitchell and Eustis to the finished record, explaining that their production work substantially shaped how it sounded.
For Keenan, the winery and the music belonged to the same larger decision about how he wanted to live and work. Speaking to journalist Darryl Sterdan in 2012, in an interview later republished by Tinnitist, he described leaving Los Angeles to build a life connected to artists and a community in Arizona. Winemaking imposed practical limits, too. The agricultural calendar determined when he needed to remain home, and his music projects had to fit around it. Recording and filming could continue there, even when extended touring could not.
Puscifer revisited that setting and the album’s theatrical world in the 2022 concert film Parole Violator. The performance reimagined every song from Conditions of My Parole, alongside another chapter in the story of Billy D and Hildy. Its closing campfire singalong reached back to the band’s 2011 and 2012 shows, reconnecting the new arrangements with the way the original album had been taken onstage.
