Deftones’ landmark album White Pony turned 20 this year, and one of the lesser-known guests on the album was Stone Temple Pilot frontman Scott Weiland.
Weiland’s vocals can be heard on “Rx Queen,” and in a new interview with WMMR’s Jaxon and Sara, Chino Moreno details how Weiland’s appearance on the album came to be.
Moreno said, “The way it happened was pretty organic, as well. It toward the end of the record-making process. I met up with him at a studio in Burbank and I was playing him some of the rough music and he pulled out a microphone and started doing his Scott Weiland scatting stuff over it. Then he started kind of harmonizing with me on the chorus, singing this lower register melody.”
Moreno continued, “I was like, ‘Wow, that sounds pretty cool,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, you can re-sing it if you want or whatever,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, whatever.’ But then we mixed the record, I said, ‘His voice sounds kind of good on there.’ It was what it was. It was pretty neat. If you listen hard enough, you can totally hear his timbre and the way that he sings. I mean, it’s totally him. But it was kind of cool the way that it happened where it wasn’t anything that we promoted. It was kind of a little Easter egg in a way.”
Deftones have a lot on the way as 2020 (thankfully) comes to a close. Their ninth studio album, Ohms, comes out this Friday (September 25) and is currently available for pre-order at Deftones.com in a variety of formats and exclusive merch bundles. The band is also dropping a 20th anniversary reissue of White Pony that will feature a remixed version of the LP titled Black Stallion. An exact release date for the reissue has not been officially confirmed, but Moreno mentioned in the interview the release will likely see the light of day during November.
