Deftones interview: Chino Moreno and Abe Cunningham speak
Stereo Warning: You guys took three years to make this record and almost broke up because of it. What happened?
Abe: I didn’t expect this album to ever be completed. It was difficult. It took three years to make, a ridiculous amount of time. There was no communication. We were very burned out after White Pony and the self-titled record. We came very close to being over with. This is what I do, music was my dream, and so I was uncomfortable to think that it could be over. I took a deep breath and it got pretty heavy, but things work in strange ways and we’re better now for it. We’re best friends and we’re brothers and we needed to tell each other that.
SW: What took Chino so long to do the vocals? Where you worried when he went on tour with Team Sleep?
Abe: Team Sleep are very dear friends of all of us so it shouldn’t have been anything competitive but it became very threatening when Chino decided to go on tour with them right when he was doing his vocals. We were like, ‘finish your vocals before you leave’ and he didn’t so that’s when it got extra tense. He went away and we didn’t know what was going on. We had put so much into this and we just left it floating and sinking. But looking back now it was necessary for him to leave and get away from this project and come back with a clear head and dive into it.
Chino: I had only a few good vocal ideas at the time. A lot had to do with my personal life, but I didn’t like what I was coming up with vocally, it was too dark and too personal. I wasn’t enjoying singing. I wanted to hide behind the guitar and I didn’t feel like writing words. 
Everybody was like ‘can you just finish the record’ and they were forgetting the quality. After stepping away and coming back everything started to open up. It probably took a whole another year, but to me it was really worth it. I didn’t want to be the person holding everyone up, but what’s the use of making anything if it’s just for the sake of making it. We came really close to a breakup ‘cause no one was communicating that well about it. Once I got back from that tour we met up and sat down and I had to ask them, ‘do you really want to do this, do you want to invest the time of your life to make this music?’ I needed to hear that everyone was really into it. They asked me the same question. They figured I didn’t care and I figured they didn’t care. Once those doors opened up, everyone started communicating.
SW: Sounds like Metallica in therapy in Some Kind of Monster.
Chino: I watched that movie when we were making the record and my jaw dropped! It was exactly what we were going through. They were making music, but they weren’t happy, just for the sake of making another Metallica record. You could tell it was a dark time for them. And we were going thru the same thing. Sometimes you gotta fall to your lowest point to realize where you’re at and then climb out of it and it can be one of the most therapeutic things.
SW: What music do you listen to on your own time?
Chino: Old classic standards, Perry Cuomo, singers and vocalists, really mellow stuff from the 40s and 50s. I listen to it now and I appreciate it. Not too much aggressive music, I listen to that when we make it. I wanted to make a diverse record, were every song was coming from a different place. It is a rollercoaster ride of different sounds moods and emotions. The dynamics are one of our favorite things. From quiet to loud, from hard to soft, from very intense to very relaxed. I wanted to bring that in but do it tastefully, to have all these different dynamics present in each song.
SW: Lyrically, what did you want to accomplish? Where did you get your inspiration?
Chino: There were but a lot of things I went through – divorce, a lot of personal things that I didn’t want to bring in and make a sad or pissed-off record. I wanted to escape my every day life so I tried to fantasize a bit more. It’s a lot more metaphoric. Beware the Water is about temptations about drugs or anything that’s not good for you. Cherry Waves is asking about the devotion to another person. I tried not to be so dry but paint it up a little bit.
SW: Explain the album title, please.
Chino: It’s not something sexual, or about suicide, actually it’s just a loose term for when you get drunk and fall asleep on your arm. Just simple and lighthearted, nothing too deep. Our record kinda needed that.
SW: What does KimDracula mean?
Chino: It’s a moniker that I was using as my email name for a while. At the beginning of making the record I was getting a little crazy and experimenting with drugs a bit, seeing how whacked out I could get. That’s my split personality I guess. It didn’t work out too well.
SW: You started working with Bob Ezrin, but finished the record yourselves. Why?
Chino: Bob started rearranging stuff right there on the spot. That was good for us ‘cause we’ll keep screwing around with things and we need someone to give us a regimen and show us a different perspective. But at the same time we wanted a Deftones record, not a watered down Deftones record. In the end it started to sound that way. Bob was trying to simplify things to make it more pop-oriented and that wasn’t good for us. Weirder is more interesting to me. It didn’t work out in the end. When we ended up finishing it ourselves, it was a really smart thing.
SW: What are you looking for in your career? So far are you satisfied? Would you care if Saturday Night Wrist hit #1 on the Billboard chart?
Abe: I don’t think we’re done yet, I can’t wait to make the next record. I don’t care if this one gets to #1. It would be neat. It would make sense, but the industry is such a strange business… Our whole premise was to go rock and it pretty much still is. We’re tangled in a strange business, but it’s exciting to do well and to be here after all these years and be relevant. We’re just happy to be doing it.
Chino: I hope the record does well but I just hope that when they hear it people think it’s a progression from what we’ve done in the past. Every record we make is harder ‘cause we don’t want to repeat ourselves so much and get lazy and fall into formulas we figured out before. That’s easy to do. It makes it less potent. If we keep on trying to push ourselves forward and a little bit left of where we went last time, I just want to be recognized for that. It would be good to sell a lot, but we were never a band that made a living out of selling records. We’re a touring band, it’s more of a live experience and that’s our main thing.
SW: Do you think this is your best studio work yet?
Abe: I was out running some errands and I was listening to it in my car. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, there’s been so many versions and different arrangements that it was driving me insane so I stopped listening to it. But now I put in the mastered version and it’s really cool, I think it’s our best record. I always thought that White Pony was our best example of our sound in terms of mix and balance of hard-soft, but I think this is the new best at this point.
Chino: I’m starting to think that just recently. I’m actually getting really excited about it. It sounds like something that wasn’t really expected. It’s not like our last record. Our greatest up to now… well, it’s hard to say that. My favorite record had been Around the Fur, because we didn’t put too much overanalysis into it, we wrote and recorded it really fast and there something really genuine about that. I hope we can do that again, I’m not too fond of spending years of making records.
SW: How much longer will you be doing this?Abe: We hope to do it as long as we can. The key is being happy. There’s no better feeling that when I look around on stage and see everybody having a good time. We’ve grown up together, seen a bit of the world together and it’s a special thing.
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