Chino and Chi interviewed by www.knac.com May, 2000 <----> In separate phone interviews from their respective Sacramento, Calif., homes, Moreno and bassist Chi Cheng (Deftones are rounded out by drummer Abe Cunningham and DJ Frank Delgado) took a break from the hectic run up to White Pony's June 20 release to talk about the new album, overhauled sound and the pressure of living up to all the expectations. KNAC.COM: Are you enjoying your last little stretch at home, it might be a while before you get back? MORENO: I'm actually looking for a place to live, man, but it's hard. I was in New York all last week, the week before that I was in L.A., we've been doing all this press and stuff. I've been traveling so I haven't been able to come home and look for places. The house we're living in right now, the guy wanted to sell it to me but it's kinda small and I don't feel right about buying it. He's been trying to work me for the price and shit so I said fuck it. I'll look for another place live. But the neighborhood where I live, all the houses are so expensive, so I was thinking maybe I'll just find a place to rent and make some more money and find a bigger place. For now I'm just stressed out on it. KNAC.COM: Are the other guys all married with children too? MORENO: Everyone but Stephen, who is single with no children. We all got kids, we're all old and weathered (laughs). Abe has a son who's two, Chi has a son who's gonna be three. Frank doesn't have any kids, but he's married. KNAC.COM: Do you find it harder to adapt to family life after coming off the road or band life after you've been home for a while? MORENO: I think it's harder to adapt to family life, for me. I come home and I don't know how to just sit around at all, I'm so accustomed to doing something creative or keeping busy. I'm not into mowing the grass and wash-ing the car. I don't mind it, but usually I'll find some excuses that are band oriented, find something to do like messing with my equipment, or whatever. Doing band stuff usually keeps my mind sane, even though it's pretty hectic. When it comes to home stuff, like trying to find this new place to live now, it just drives me nuts. It's some-thing I'm not accustomed to. The last two places we've lived in, my wife found them and I just came and looked and said "they're cool" and lived there. But now I have to go out and find places and meet with people and it's hard for me to explain what I do. I talk to people and then when I tell them I'm a musician they bug out and think I'm gonna have band practice in the living room. And some people think that because we have two young kids they're gonna wreck the place. I found this one place, a dope house, and the lady was like "well do you have any pets?" And I said "no, I have two kids." And she was like, "Uh oh" and started bugging out, so I said forget it, and kept looking. KNAC.COM: You'll have plenty of band stuff to keep you sane in the coming months. MORENO: Yeah, our main concern is getting the record out and focusing all our effort on that. This record is gonna be a big step in our career and we want to make sure everything is in line. KNAC.COM: Do you get the feeling things are going to absolutely explode for you? MORENO: I think everyone has that gut feeling. But it's never good to just rely on that, so we're really working hard about the way we're presenting this record. This record to me is way different that a lot of stuff that's go-ing on right now. We didn't reinvent ourselves or totally change our style, but it's just different. CHENG: That's the smoke everyone has been blowing up our butts. We'll see. I'm just happy that people dig the album and I would like a lot of kids to hear it. Our fans are kind of protective of us because they've had to find out the hard way about us and there's a feeling of not wanting to share it with other kids you may consider lugheads. They've got to realize that we want to bring the music to a bigger audience. We're not trying to be the biggest band in the world, we don't have any aspirations or cares about being that. But we definitely would like to have more kids into the music, more kids at the shows. KNAC.COM: Are you surprised the band has grown to the point that it has given the brutality of your earlier material? CHENG: It was all in steps so everything seemed natural to us. The first album by the time that we were done with it sold 200,000 maybe 300,000 copies and we were pretty happy especially considering what type of album it was. And then the second album, right toward the end, went gold. So fortunately doing everything in steps keeps you humble and if nothing's to abrupt or sudden, it's kind of nice. KNAC.COM: It seemed like you guys have taken great pains to prepare everyone for the fact that this album was going to take a different track. MORENO: The impression got put out there that this was going to be a really mellow record and it's not a mel-low record, it's actually pretty heavy, but it's not that heavy, aggressive, senseless angry music. It's not like that I'm going through this painful time in my life and I just need to vent. It's more emotionally heavy as opposed to being an angry record with chunky riffs on it. The single that we chose, "Change (In A House Of Flies)," it's already on the Internet somehow and people are hearing it and all the feedback I've read is saying it's different, but it's Deftones and it's the most beautiful song they've heard by us, and I dig that. It's not like a novelty type of song, like, say, The Bloodhound Gang where you know you like it, it's a funny song and you dig it, you bob your head to it, but it still gives people a lot of reason to hate it. Our record doesn't have anything like that on it. It doesn't give anybody any real reason to hate it. The songs are pretty well structured, and they don't just have a bunch of riffs and nonsense and useless parts in them, they're pretty lean and mean. It's more of a trip from beginning to end on the record, there's not any wasted time. There's all these different moods and they fit in right. There's some songs that are real extreme on either end of the spectrum. If you compare a songs like "Elite" with something like "Teenager," they are extremely different songs, but all the other songs help bridge them together so it's not like "here's our wimpy song, here's our heavy song." It all kinda fits. CHENG: We have naturally progressed, our band is never going to reach a musical plateau where we feel like we've found something we've wanted. We didn't deviate from anything we did, we just strengthened a lot of the characteristics of our band, the moods, the songs, the ups and downs, we strengthened things that are good qualities in our band. KNAC.COM: The songs seem more complete and song-like than the blunter, more cryptic material of the first two albums. MORENO: When we went in to do this record we knew we that didn't want to make a record with a lot of riffs on it and a bunch of screaming vocals over the top, which, especially on our first CD, there was a lot more of that, attitude as opposed to songs. It took us about a year and throwing so many different ideas away and coming up with new ones and at the end weighing everything out. Stephen and I personally had a lot of differences with this record. At first I was hoping he would come up with a lot of the songs and then he didn't, he was writing a bunch of heavy-ass riffs, these violent riffs. And I don't mind that, but that's all he wanted to do. And when nobody really would play along because everything was starting to sound like that we went through this little lull where we weren't really writing too much stuff. So I said fuck it and picked up a guitar and Abe and I started writing songs. But when Abe and I write songs we write way different songs. Most of the stuff I write is more melodic, I don't usually crunch on the guitar, it's more strummy and open sounding. So there was two different types of music completely going on, and right before we went to record is when we started putting it all together. Stephen would put his stuff into my songs and they would become Deftones songs and vice versa. And when we started playing guitar together, everyone started joining in and that's when it started to work. A lot of those songs are the ones that made it on the record. A song like "Knife Party" is a good example of a combination between all of us. Those are usually the best songs when everyone has all their input in them because I honestly don't think my songs are the best and I don't think Stephen does either. KNAC.COM: Was it a battle the whole way, getting this record done? CHENG: It was a battle the whole way and it worked out, there was a lot of tension and people wanting differ-ent things, but we did end up in some sort of compromise. It was a cool album because I don't think anybody particularly wanted to showboat. I moved to the backseat as far as trying to be a songwriter on this album to just writing the best basslines I possibly could. On this album I think it was important for Chino to establish himself as a songwriter and Stephen feeling challenged by it and trying to maintain being the primary songwriter and I didn't feel like being another cook in the kitchen. KNAC.COM: You mentioned your own writing style is more mellow. Are you more comfortable singing that way as well or has it been a struggle to move away from just screaming to actual singing? MORENO: I've always loved to sing. When we did our first record everybody was saying, "Why are you scream-ing, radio's not going to play this, blah, blah, blah, why don't you sing more?" And I was like, "Well I just feel like screaming." That's just the way I was, a lot of these songs were written when I was 16 years old, so I was an angry teenager who felt like the whole world was against them. That's the way I perceived it and that's what came out. Now radio is playing all kinds of heavy shit that they wouldn't even think of playing when our first record came out. Now our label and everybody wants us to fit back in with all this, but we feel like we've already grown past it. KNAC.COM: I talked to Stephen when your first album came out and he likened your voice to another instrument. Do you still feel this way, or do see your voice as more of a complement to the music? MORENO: I think I've grown out of that. On the first record, especially, my vocals were kind of intertwined in the music. It was more like an instrument, I was just singing in and out of the music. On this album there's still some of that intertwined stuff, but now I find myself singing more over the songs a lot more. That's where we have progressed and I feel like I can do this now and I've figured out how I can do it. KNAC.COM: With your vocals standing out more, has that changed the way you write lyrics? The first album was very cryptic, do you now try to tell a complete story or make a definite point? MORENO: I'm probably telling more stories now, but they're still pretty metaphorical. I still don't really speak just straight out or tell blatant stories. This album, if anything, has a lot of scenarios, but not a lot of it is straightforward, it leaves you thinking, "I know he said this, but does he mean that?" KNAC.COM: The titles help add an air of mystery, too, a lot of them are quite perplexing and seem to have no relation to the song. MORENO: Some of them do and some of them are just more of an idea of maybe what the song was inspired from or where it came from. Honestly, the titles are like the very last thing that I do. I usually like to be a little bit out there. For me to call the single "Change," that was hard from me, but I didn't want to alienate people too much. I felt that since this was going to be a single, I wanted the title to have something to do with what was in the song. But another song, like the first song "Fieticeira," that song doesn't actually have a chorus in it, it's a really weirdly written song, that title was this name of a Brazilian game show host I read about in a magazine. I liked the way it sounded. And then a song like "Teenager," the word's not in the song, but the story of the song is a total teenage crush or teenage love song. KNAC.COM: How did Terry Date [who has produced all three Deftones albums] factor into the new album, did you consider other producers to capture the changing mood of the band? CHENG: He was on track the whole way and he was great. Our relationship with Terry has been growing and he's learned a lot to grow with us. So he's open-minded and cool. We considered everyone for this album, we didn't really consider using him because we didn't want to do anything we'd done before thought it might be cool to bring in another producer. But it ended up being like a full-circle where we realized musically we were going to be the ones to change things up and that Terry is open enough to capture what we want. There was quite a bit of tension and I don't think another producer would have understood what was going on. KNAC.COM: Where did the White Pony concept come from and why did it stick? MORENO: I don't why it stuck, it was just an idea that I came up with from no one specific place. I just liked the imagery of it all, and then we created that little logo with the horse and decided "let's just use this, let's run with it and see how we far we can manipulate this." Coming up with artwork is really hard, especially for a band like us, because it's really easy to want to go along with the music and make everything really dirty and scary or heavy metal or really artsy. To me it's not really artsy, it's not really anything. It stands on its own, it's kind of militant in a way, it has its own look to it. KNAC.COM: I read where you said you felt pressure doing this record. Is that the pressure of the expectations that this re-cord is really going to blow the band up big or the creative pressure of your musical metamorphosis and making sure you got it right? MORENO: If anything it was knowing that everybody expects this record to be huge. We don't have any formula for making a hit record. But when you're a band that can make novelty songs, hits are a lot easier. A band like Sugar Ray, for example, if they had to make a Sugar Ray song a hit from their first album it would have been difficult. But they did it by changing their style completely for one or two songs on each album since, and every hit they have now is that different style. Or Limp Bizkit, that song "Nookie" it's goofy and it has that novelty thing to it. But I can't do that, I feel I have already earned this respect to not do anything silly. A lot of times being silly might sell you some records, but I don't think we're going to be going there any time soon. We're just going to make our records and hopefully the people will come around to it instead of us changing our ways and going somewhere else to make a hit record.