Chino interviewd by Shehzaad Jiwani
chartattack.com
Wednesday August 17, 2005 @ 09:00 AM
You have a lot of different influences, like Failure and Pinback, and that
space-rock sound comes off with Team Sleep whereas it might not with Deftones.
Do you like that “anything goes” aspect of this band?
CM: I honestly think I can do that with Deftones as well, but in the back of my
mind I know that there are a lot of fans that are specifically into the more
aggressive, heavy stuff. I don’t want to completely alienate fans of that stuff
because I know a lot of our fans like us for our first couple of records which
had a lot more of that, you know. With this project, I don’t have that boundary.
I don’t really have a fan base to make happy, you know, there is no fan base yet,
we’re making one. We just make music that we like to listen to and try to keep it
as genuine as possible.
Do you prefer that over the brainy writing process you have with Deftones?
CM: Yeah. It’s not that I don’t like heavy stuff, because I like heavy music just
as well. It’s just that when you’re on your fifth album with a band, you don’t want
to repeat yourself and you don’t want to make a record just to make other people
happy, you want to make yourself happy, but you don’t want to be too self-indulgent.
There’s a lot of things going through your mind making a record, well, that’s why
the records take so long to make. I just look at it like I want the album to sound
good when I listen to it. I don’t want it to sound dated or anything.
What was it like working with Bob Ezrin for the new Deftones record?
CM: Oh, it was, you know, whatever. I’d rather not. If you don’t have anything nice
to say, don’t say anything, really. There were times when we really got along and I
learned a lot of things from him but there were a lot of times when he’s in his own
world where he thinks he knows what’s best and he doesn’t know what’s best, really.
It just wasn’t fun to do and it wasn’t a fun record to make. The music turned out rad.
It’s just when you’re making a record, especially when you’re working on vocals,
I’ve only worked with a couple of producers and most of the records I’ve done with
Terry Date. The reason we chose Ezrin is because we wanted to do something different,
but I learned that different isn’t always good. If we want to make a different album,
it’s something that we do on our own, not something some producer comes in and says we
should do.
Any idea what the record’s going to sound like?
CM: Yeah, I heard it all, I made it, I know exactly what it’s going to sound like.
Can I explain it? Nah. [laughs] It’s different. We definitely didn’t want to make
the same record, you know what I mean. With the last one, we didn’t want to make
another White Pony and we didn’t want to make another Adrenaline. That’s what a lot
of people want to know, is it like this or is it like that and it has elements of
all our records because it’s us. But I think it’s a broader record. There’s a lot
of other things going on. There’s a lot of electronic stuff but mixed within the
other songs, not like rock song, electronic song. The songs have a lot more parts
and there’s a lot of different things. It was written over a long period of time.
We started it about a year and a half ago. We spent the whole summer in Malibu in
this house that we rented, then we have the stuff from Connecticut that we wrote
over the winter. We have a lot of different stuff. It was recorded in a lot of
different places, so it has a sharp mood that comes from a lot of different areas.
It makes it a bigger, huger record. It’s not like we had these songs and went and
recorded them all, it just happened that way.
Deftones have been planning a b-sides/rarities release for a while. When can we expect that?
CM: I heard it was coming out next month, but then I heard that there were a few
things they weren’t finished with for the DVD stuff. I talked to Abe yesterday and
they’re cutting all of the footage together. There’s a couple songs that I haven’t
sent them yet for the b-sides collection that I’m trying to accumulate. It might be
in the fall. I hope to get it out before summer’s over, but it could be out for early
fall, then the new record comes out early next year.
www.deftonesworld.com
