The Daily Times

Carina Round’s first face-to-face meeting with Maynard James Keenan, the often-enigmatic, occasionally macabre frontman for industrial rock band Tool, sounds lifted from one of Keenan’s songs.

Round, a respected British singer-songwriter whose work impressed Keenan so much that he wanted to recruit her for a solo project, received a call from Keenan’s people asking whether she’d be interested in contributing to Puscifer, the vehicle for Keenan’s individual work.

It started out innocuously enough — she received copies of the three Puscifer releases, listened to them back-to-back and was intrigued.

“I still had no idea what was going on, but it was incredibly interesting,” Round told The Daily Times this week. “I respected his work with Tool, and I’ve always loved his lyrics and thought his voice is spectacular. I got a call, asking if it was something I’d be interested in.”

After performing a Vegas show, she traveled down to Arizona to meet with Keenan. That’s when things got surreal.

“I was covered head-to-toe in bedbug bites,” Round added with a laugh. “I had been in a hotel room for a couple of days, doing a show, and was bitten all over. But it was a meeting of the minds, and I got the job.”

Now, Round — classically beautiful, supremely talented and incredibly salty-tongued — is pulling double-duty on tour with Puscifer, a jaunt that brings her and Keenan to Knoxville for a show next week. Not only is she an integral part of the most recent Puscifer album, “Conditions of My Parole,” she’s also in the live band — and opens the show with her solo material.

“It’s been pretty hard work, but it’s damn satisfying,” Round said. “My opening show is a pretty straightforward rock show, but the Puscifer show is … very strange. It’s incredibly interesting to be a part of the vision of someone as brilliant as him, and it’s very satisfying creatively as well.”

For her part of the concert, she’ll be performing all new material from a forthcoming 2012 release, her first since 2007’s “Slow Motion Addict.” Round first entered the scene with 2001’s “The First Blood Mystery,” a record that critics interpreted as heralding the arrival of a new P.J. Harvey. It’s a stark, visceral album, but it’s also one that gives Round pause ten years later.

“That album was basically a 19-year-old spewing her guts up and going, ‘This is what it is; just deal with it,’ but that’s not who I am right now,” she said. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to put those feelings into something more tangible and more craft-like and less of an exorcism. Now, I’m trying to just make something I want to listen to in 10 years’ time.

“Although I love ‘First Blood Mystery,’ what it is and what it did for me, it’s not something I want to put on and listen to anymore. It’s too depressing and painful.”

The new album has taken longer to put together since Round left the Interscope label; piecing it together as she’s able to afford it has made the process a slow one, but it’s also given her the time to make inroads into the Los Angeles music scene. Besides Keenan, she counts artists like Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan among her peers, and working with such musicians has energized the process of making the to-be-titled album.

“One of the most fun things about making a record is that it’s a platform for every single part of your character,” she said. “I just think that’s a lovely thing, a lovely platform that we have, that so many don’t use or explore. I wanted to explore different sides of my personality on this record, and having the opportunity in making it to work with people like Maynard and Billy is just an honor.

“To see how everything changes and how these people work and carve a place for themselves and to be a part of that is just priceless to me. I feel like I learned so much during that time, and subliminally, I feel like I brought some of that, to an extent, to my songwriting and creative process.”

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