A Perfect Circle released eMOTIVe in the United States on November 2, 2004, deliberately putting their third studio album in stores on Election Day. Ten covers and two original songs tackled war, power and the people caught between them. Alongside drastically altered versions of familiar songs, “Passive” gave a home to material that had begun in the abandoned Tapeworm project.
Guitarist Billy Howerdel told Metal Hammer in 2018 that the project grew out of wartime confusion and apathy, with the aim of getting people to pay attention. The selections drew on music that had mattered to the musicians over many years. He remembered the track list coming together readily, with relatively few rejected choices. Reproducing the original arrangements held little appeal; changing the compositions was part of doing the songs justice. Howerdel produced the album, with Maynard James Keenan serving as executive producer.
Their experiments had already begun on the road. Revolver’s 2025 retrospective described soundchecks during the Thirteenth Step tour where Howerdel tried new musical ideas while Keenan sang words from “People Are People” and “When the Levee Breaks” over them. Howerdel later explained to Rolling Stone that some pieces had started as original A Perfect Circle compositions before another writer’s lyrics turned them into covers. Even the connection to the original vocal melody could be loose. The band was using those songs as material for its own writing partnership.
John Lennon’s “Imagine” made the approach especially clear. A familiar appeal for peace became something slow and foreboding. Keenan told New York Daily News writer Jim Farber that the political climate called for a “death march feel.” He wanted listeners to encounter the words again rather than switch off because they already knew the song. The change in delivery was central to the point.
Howerdel stepped forward as a singer, too. On Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” associated with Elvis Costello’s recording, he took the lead vocal. Howerdel told Metal Hammer that Costello had been a childhood hero. Keenan described his bandmate’s performance to Farber as coming from a “broken man’s point of view.” That perspective turned the song’s question into an expression of exhaustion, giving another familiar lyric a different emotional setting.
“Passive” carried a separate history. It developed from “Vacant,” a Tapeworm collaboration involving Keenan, Danny Lohner and Trent Reznor that A Perfect Circle had already performed in 2001. The shelved project’s material resurfaced here alongside the other original, “Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums.” Those two tracks kept eMOTIVe from being exclusively a collection of outside songs.
The arrangements changed again when A Perfect Circle performed their first three albums in full during their 2010 return. Howerdel told Rolling Stone that eMOTIVe presented a particular challenge: its subdued passages needed reshaping to sustain a complete live set. “When the Levee Breaks” became one of his favorites to play, while Keenan’s performance of “Fiddle and the Drum,” accompanied by only a few piano notes, stood out for its sparseness.
