“Chartattack” – August 2005 // Chino Interviewed

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