Billy Howerdel remembers the bad weather. He remembers the three New Zealand cities, the audiences waiting at the other end, and the small plane they had to charter when the conditions threatened to derail the entire journey.
It has been more than two decades since A Perfect Circle crossed the Tasman, but the details have stayed with him.
“We played three cities in New Zealand, and it was great. I vividly remember those shows,” Howerdel tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “One show in particular, I think it was Wellington, the weather was so bad we had to rent a private prop plane to get to the gig. I had to borrow things. It was a whole adventure.
“But it was all good. Everyone was up for the intrepid show at the other end of it, so it was great.”
A Perfect Circle’s return to Australia and New Zealand this December may be more carefully routed, but it is hardly leisurely. The band will arrive after performances in Mexico City, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, move across Australia and New Zealand, and then continue towards Japan.
Somewhere in there, Howerdel expects they will get a single day to recover from the jet lag. It might be in Adelaide. After 13 years, he would have preferred a little more time. “It’s great, but I just wish we had a little bit more time,” he admits. “We’re just in and out. We’re hopping around the Pacific Rim.”
The band will arrive with a catalogue that has changed considerably since Australian audiences last saw them. A Perfect Circle have released an entire album, 2018’s Eat the Elephant, without touring it here, and they have also returned with new single, “Starless”. More music is actively taking shape behind the scenes.
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“We’ll have a song, or maybe two, that we will be playing,” Howerdel says. “No one there has heard any of ‘Eat the Elephant’, so that’s exciting, to bring some of that back.”
The Australian run includes sold-out arenas and more intimate spaces, including Sydney’s Carriageworks. Howerdel is interested in what that difference might create, although he knows intimacy can be unpredictable. The smallest show of A Perfect Circle’s recent European tour became his favourite of the run, but he is not convinced size alone was responsible.
“It’s hit and miss,” he says. “If you’re anything over 2,000 people, things get a little blurry towards the back of the room. When you get into 500 seats, things get super intimate and almost a little more intimidating.
“You’re doing huge festivals, huge stages, and you become ingrained within the crowd, so to speak.”
Yet the most intimidating crowds Howerdel has faced were not necessarily the smallest — they were the ones filled with people he knew.
After becoming a parent, he began encountering the parents of his children’s friends at shows. Some had no idea he was a musician. Their presence could pull him out of a performance in a way thousands of strangers never could.
“You’re thinking, ‘What are [their] parents thinking right now as I’m playing?’” he says. “It’s one of the only times I’ve been taken out of the show.”
One woman attended the band’s Hollywood Bowl performance believing Howerdel worked at the school, where he often runs the sound for assemblies and plays.
“She had no idea I was in a band,” he recalls, laughing. “I was like, ‘I love that,’ because I’m always running the sound for the Christmas concert with the kids or the choir. That was my big reveal. That was my Clark Kent reveal.”
There is something appealingly ordinary in the image: one of alternative rock’s most meticulous composers quietly mixing sound at a school concert while the people beside him remain unaware of his other life.
There will be less chance of disappearing into the background this December. Puscifer will join A Perfect Circle as special guests, placing Maynard James Keenan at the front of two radically different performances each night. “Maynard working double duty,” Howerdel jokes.
The arrangement means A Perfect Circle will be touring alongside a band firmly within its extended creative family. It also gives Howerdel the opportunity to watch Keenan shift between two distinct worlds.
“I usually do check out the opening band, but not every night,” he says. “That one’s almost going to be hard not to check out because Puscifer is so entertaining. They’re friends, they’re in the family.”
Howerdel has witnessed a version of the transformation before. On the ‘Sessanta’ tour celebrating Keenan’s 60th birthday, A Perfect Circle, Puscifer, and Primus rotated through their sets while members of the other bands remained onstage, seated on couches as though watching a jam in somebody’s living room.
This time, Puscifer’s own theatrical identity may make the line between the two performances more pronounced. “Puscifer’s so specific and so theatrical,” Howerdel says. “He’s in a different mode. He wears a different hat.”
How Keenan will shape A Perfect Circle’s Australian set remains unknown, even to the person responsible for much of the music. “The setlist is Maynard’s territory,” Howerdel says. “He’ll write the setlist to where he feels like he’s going to be able to present the best… I stay out of the setlist game.”
That leaves several possibilities — early favourites, songs from Eat the Elephant, and new material that shows what A Perfect Circlesounds like in 2026.
“Starless” offers the clearest indication so far. The song is immediately recognisable as A Perfect Circle, but it does not sound like the band attempting to recreate a particular era.
“That one felt familiar,” Howerdel explains. “The song came together quickly and without a lot of forethought into what it was. It felt at home, and where I’d like things to go.”
Howerdel’s demos can range from detailed arrangements to the equivalent of a scratch on a napkin. “Starless” was already well developed by the time he presented it to Keenan, largely because Howerdel was curious to discover where the vocalist would take it.
That curiosity remains central to their partnership after nearly three decades.
“I’m almost always surprised,” he says. “I’m working on a song right now. I’m tracking a song — I took the break just to do this press — and his vocals on it are so not where I would go, which is the beauty of collaboration.
“That’s what you want. You want someone to bring something that you wouldn’t have thought of, and he’s amazing at that.”
Being surprised by a collaborator is exciting when they add something unexpected. It is more difficult when they want to remove something you love.
Keenan may hear an instrumental passage Howerdel considers an “A-plus” idea and ask him to alter it, or abandon it entirely. Accepting that request requires what Howerdel describes as both musical and social maturity.
“When he’s writing, he’s got a story in mind, he’s got a vibe in mind, and sometimes the heavier part or the lighter part just doesn’t work in that place,” he says.
He points to “Gravity”, from 2003’s Thirteenth Step, as an example. Howerdel was deeply attached to the original instrumental, and disappointed when parts were reshaped. With distance, however, he understands why it had to happen.
“It’s not an instrumental,” he says. “He’s got a story and a perspective in mind that it’s still got to fit. He’s got the experience, but also the self-respect to ask for what he needs to make the story the most compelling and be able to tell it.”
If collaboration depends on surrendering ideas, the writing process depends on capturing them before they disappear.
The central riff in “Starless” arrived almost incidentally while Howerdel was watching television. He stopped, documented it and preserved the moment before it could be overthought.
“The moral of that story is to have some way to document what you’ve got in mind so those ideas aren’t fleeting,” he says. “There’s something nice about banging on the table, humming a melody, getting it down to your phone and then putting it in the studio.”
Entering the studio with the deliberate intention to create can sometimes produce the opposite result. Howerdel turns on his equipment, notices that something needs adjusting and begins tinkering. By the time the sound is perfect, the spark is gone.
“You just don’t want to overthink it,” he says. “You want to act upon what the moment has presented.”
The same philosophy applies to ideas that initially seem wrong. A lead line near the end of the bridge in “Starless” sounded so campy to Howerdel that he treated it as a placeholder, to remain only until he found something better.
Instead, he changed its character, played it loudly and discovered that the part belonged.
“I forced it to work,” he says. “It needed to be played loud and live for that to take shape.
“The rule is there’s no rules. Writing from absurdity, or writing with imperfection and embracing imperfection, is the way to break out of staleness.”
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That willingness to tolerate imperfection may be especially important for a band whose catalogue has been dissected for decades. Howerdel is conscious of the framework around A Perfect Circle, but not beholden to a formula.
He writes partly for himself and partly to draw the strongest possible response from Keenan. Sometimes that means presenting music he is not certain his collaborator will accept.
On Eat the Elephant, “Hourglass” and “The Contrarian” both began that way. Howerdel wanted to show Keenan the colours he was interested in using. When Keenan responded enthusiastically, possibility quickly became pressure: now, the experiment had to become a song.
“All these things of process are a work in progress,” Howerdel says. “They’re imperfect. They’re mysterious. I get a little bit superstitious about it, and I try not to do too much.
“I try to do as much as I can without ruining what makes something special.”
A new A Perfect Circle record is now somewhere within that mysterious, imperfect process. Howerdel does not offer a date hint or big announcement, but the work is clearly moving.
Asked whether more music will emerge after the Australian tour, he suggests fans may not even have to wait that long.
“Yeah,” he says. “You might even get one more during. I don’t know. I’m working on that right now, so we’ll see how it goes.”
Ticket information for A Perfect Circle’s ANZ tour is available here.
