deftones & the Triumph of Hard Rock

The hottest band of the season talks with Harmony Central -- and offers advice and support for tomorrow's headliners

by Steve Baltin
July 18, 2000

Hard rock is once again the dominant force in rock music, with acts like Korn and Limp Bizkit ruling the roost. Though many of these bands enjoy great commercial success, the question remains which of them will come to the forefront and continue in the tradition that Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath began and was carried on by Kiss, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, et al.

With White Pony, Sacramento, California's deftones have taken a major step toward emerging as leaders of the new movement. White Pony seems not only certain to follow the success of the band's first two albums, both of which went gold, but as one of the most anticipated releases of the year, it seems likely to blow by both of those discs on its way to platinum status and beyond.

For the quintet, however, that popularity is secondary to the artistic accomplishments of White Pony. On their third effort, the group has woven together the disparate personalities and influences of its five members to create an album that moves from trip-hop balladry to guitar-crunching hard rock to Pink Floyd-esque sprawling arrangements.

On June 1, 2000, the group held an Internet "house party" to debut White Pony for its fans. Prior to the band's showcasing the album and doing a "surprise" performance, Harmony Central spoke with all five members about the latest album, success, and the current popularity of the music they've been playing for a decade.

Songwriting

When you're writing, does it enter your mind how it's going to translate to the stage?

Chino Moreno (vocals): No, I don't really do that. I should, maybe, because some songs are obviously better than others as live songs in the beginning when we go in and write 'em. Especially on this record, there's a lot of songs that were just written in the studio. So we had no idea how they were going to sound once we got into rehearsals and started playing. But everything just came together. When we did our last record, the majority of the music was written in the studio -- but by the time we got to go do rehearsals, it was terrible. This time, I pictured that it was going to be a hundred times worse, but it actually sounded pretty good.

Was the material on this album written in a concentrated time span or over an extended period?

Moreno: It was written over a long period of time, almost a year. We didn't write on the road at all. We probably toured for about two and a half years, maybe even a little longer. When we got home everybody kind of started writing, but everybody was writing separately. Everybody would come in with songs already and then would say, "Okay, check this out, play this, play this, play this.. …" And then actually -- in the middle of the whole writing process -- we just stopped thinking about trying to dictate what's gonna happen here and everybody just did their own thing, and that's when all the best stuff started coming out.

So then we were on that vibe for a while, and what we did was then combine that vibe with a lot of the stuff that we all wrote on our own -- and I think it makes for a really diverse record. And especially, time-wise. Like, our last album we wrote and recorded in four months. Whereas this one, we had all this time. So you have four months of feeling on a record as opposed to us now having a couple years of just living life. There was more stuff to write about, and just a lot of different time spans covered too.

White Pony is a very diverse record, but it also has a sense of continuity. In terms of determining song sequence, was that sense of continuity important to you?

Moreno: Yeah. The sequence, obviously, wasn't done in the beginning, because I didn't know what songs would make it and what songs wouldn't, but out of all the songs we wrote -- 30 or more songs -- we only recorded 12, 13 of them. We just picked what we really thought was best musically. We got everything just the way we wanted it, and then I put the vocals on it. And once I put the vocals on the song, then I kind of realized which ones were going to be the best ones, which ones I'd use and which ones I wouldn't. But, yeah, I had no idea what it was gonna come out to be like until it was mastered. And when it was mastered, then I got to stand back and look at it and say, "Okay." And it's an album, and like you said, it has a sense of continuity. It starts in one area, takes you here, then takes you there. That's what albums should be like. I wish more albums were like that these days.

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