7 Words "I wrote it back when I was 16 years old. It's probably one of the angriest songs I've ever written. It was about being oppressed by people around me, the authorities, I felt like the whole world was against me. It was like I was lashing out at those people.". . . My own summer (shove it) "That song was written while I was in Seattle recording the record. It was one of the last songs we wrote. I was completely burnt out. In the morning I was getting pissed off at everyone because I'd be up in the studio all night. I'd try and go in my bed, I'd go to sleep and the sun would keep waking me up and I would go outside and it would just hurt. So I went in the studio and it just kind of came out. I wrote a song kind of about Armageddon and basically the song says in my own summer there'd be no sun, nobody in the streets, nothing around. That's basically what the song is about. It's kind of an anti-sun song. It says cloud please come shove the sun aside, that's where shove it comes from."   Around the fur "In the album's title track, "Around the Fur," CHINO conveys his fascination with the dark and trashy side of the fashion, glamour and prostitution worlds. Says CHINO, "It's basically about being infatuated with the dirtiness of life. I'll do anything to try to get into it and understand it, because I want to see where everybody's coming from. I'm hoping that people don't take it as a sexual reference, because it's not about that at all."   Headup Cavalera: "The song we did together was very special. They'd lost a friend too. When me and Chino recorded the vocals we were both on the floor and emotions were going everywhere. It was almost as if we had Dana in the studio sitting between the two of us. We were raging so hard, and I remember looking up and seeing Chino had smashed his nose and there was blood all over his face. He had this expression on his face which said, 'How much more energy can you put into a song!' It was unbelievable! When I put that song on I get goosebumps."   MX "I didn't really like Mx that much, and I had completely different vocals than I had written in the practice place when we were writing it. When I was recording the vocals in the control room, and I started to say to myself, 'This is boring. Throw this song away or stop rolling the tape.' And I just wrote a whole new song over the actual music. New melodies, new whole idea. It was just something that I was feeling at the moment. And then Abe's wife (Annalynn) was there in the studio and I was thinking there are these parts that I'd really like a girl's voice on, so I asked her if she'd do it. She was like, 'I don't wanna do this' and I talked her into it. After it was all done I had a completely different song. Right then it became one of my favorite songs, 'cause it was something I completely changed around myself. It could have been just a normal, kind of boring song, but it ended up being one of my favorite songs in about an hour, with me just realizing that I can completely do whatever I want that completely changes it. So that was cool. I would just hit the old bottle of wine... I had a music stand with some of my lyrics on it, some candles burning, and instead of using a hand-held microphone like I usually use, I was using a really nice microphone. I just stood there and let loose. It was something I'd never done. I think that's how singers usually record, but on the first record I recorded everything live with the band in the room, with a little Shure 58 microphone. I'd never done it that way and it was a lot different. It was fun. It felt a little bit more personal for some reason, 'cause I was in there by myself, with my headphones on, and most of the record was recorded in the dark, and a majority of the record was recorded when I was drunk. So it felt pretty good. I thought it was pretty cool." "Why White Pony? What's that all about? Really it's just a name I like, you know what I mean? At first i wanted to name it "One-Trick Pony" but there's a Paul Simon record already called that. So I kinda lost that idea, and "White Pony" gives off the same vibe. It was coming up a lot, and I liked it so I brought it to the band and everybody else liked it, so we just stuck with it. It's kind of the theme, even though there's nothing behind it."   Street carp "It's about meeting someone on the street that you haven't seen in a long time and you really don't want to talk to them, but it's somebody that you are still infatuated with."   Also:   Street Carp "A classic deftones song, with a rolling riff and some really interesting chords in the chorus. the vocals are kinda crazy - I'm singing out loud over the top of the music, like (the smiths front man) Morrissey or something, a cool contrast"   Knife party "Knife Party," was inspired by a bizarre drunken party on the band's tour bus. Moreno says that drummer Abe Cunningham collects knives--"like stilettos and butterfly knives"--and distributed them to band members one night. "Abe busted out all his knives and everybody on the bus had a knife and was dancing. It was the stupidest thing, and everybody was laughing about how silly the whole thing was," says Moreno. The knife party became a band joke, and months later, Moreno decided to use it in a song. "I made up this fake scenario of some kind of underworld society of knives, people who just get off on these erotic fantasies," he says. "Or something like that. An 'Eyes Wide Shut' kind of thing."   Also:   Knife Prty "the record company wanted this to be the first single, but I battled them because it was a little to weird. its a seductive song with a lot of violent imagery. people don't tend to like sex mixed with violence. The mid section has amazing vocals from a girl called Rodleen who worked next door tour studio" Digital bath "I wrote this in the bathroom of the house where we stayed in teh Hollywood Hills while I was doing my vocals. We had this bathroom of the house that merged Abe's room and my room together, and we spent a lot of time just hanging out in the bathroom, staying up and partying all night. I came up with this scenario of luring a female friend down into the bath and electrocuting her. It's a beautiful song, but it does have a sinister side."   Also:   Digital Bath  "Abe and I wrote this one, and I play guitar on it. its real celestial sounding with intimate singing. there's a big story behind it. Most of the songs on this album are about different situations"   Passenger  "I did this song with Maynard from Tool. Basically, I told him I wanted to create a scenario of being in a car and being taken for a drive when you don't really know what's going on. I wanted him to create a lot of imagery. he wrote a majority of the of the lyrics and left blanks for me to fill in. It seems like you're being held captive, but enjoy what's going on."     "Having Maynard perform on the record wasn't something that we planned on doing. We didn't plan on having any guest on the record. But being a fan of Tool and A Perfect Circle, once Maynard was involved, it was just a magical thing for us. Honestly, when he first started working with us, he wasn't supposed to sing with us. He was just working on the arrangements, riff structures, time signatures, and things like that. I don't know if you're a big fan of Tool's music, but they're really mathematical. I've been to their rehearsal space, and there's this big chart that just looks like calculus--the way they write songs, it's just crazy. It was good to have someone else who has different ways of writing songs, 'cause everyone has a different way of doing it. He came in and we started working on this one song in particular, and he just grabbed the microphone and started singing along to it, and my jaw just dropped. All of a sudden our band sounded like Tool; it was just crazy. Then, probably two months later, we went in to record the album, and I went in to record the vocals on it, and I just kept hearing his voice, this re-occurring melody with his voice coming over it. So I called him and asked him if he wanted to come down and sing on the record, and he had no problem with it. Once he came in, I gave him sort of what I wanted the song to be about, and he wrote a couple of ideas down, and the next day he came in with all the lyrics written all out with blank spaces where my lyrics were supposed to be. He's very professional like that. He wants everything set perfectly, which is the complete opposite to the way that I write, so it was cool. And then I went in and did my vocals over it, and it just seemed that our voices blended together pretty good. Yeah, it came out pretty good, so we decided to put it on the record."   Also:   Passenger "This is the one with Maynard. its about being a passenger on a cry journey - we have a lot of car songs! Maynard and I trade off in the verses. its a lot like a tool song, where it goes through different phases. me and Maynard have been friends for a while"     Change "It's a metaphorical song. You could take it in the literal sense of me watching someone turn into a fly and taking them home with me and pulling of their wings and laughing. It spawns from me being a complete a--hole and getting the complete repercussion for it by having my life taken away."    Also:   Change "that's the first single we are putting out in America. its not mellow but very washy. its a bit like be quiet and drive. I play guitar on that one too. its a beautiful metamorphis"   Feiticera "The working title was New Murderer, the name itself is some Brazilian name that I read in a magazine and just liked. It's loosely based on the scenario of being taken captive. It's completely fictional. I want people to listen to it and feel like they're in the situation, because I do put myself in the story. It's up to the people to listen to it and figure out whether I'm enjoying myself or not, even though it sounds a little eerie."   Also:   Feiticeira - "An old type of deftones song, with really cool rhythms and heavy soft dynamics. Its named after a Brazilian female, but its lyrically about a kidnapping scenario. It details a few hours of being held captive. There's a lot of dialogue in there that was fun to write"   Korea "This was the first song we wrote for the record. It's a little heavy. It talks about the white pony, strippers, and drugs." (The "White Pony" is a very highly potent form of cocaine.)   Also:   Korea  "The first song we wrote for the record. we played it live on the us ozzfest. real heavy and bouncy"     RX Queen "Its about my wife...Dont ask." (The girl in the song is his "Prescription Queen" because of all the drugs she has to take because of her illness. "Rx" stands for "prescription.")   Also:   RX Queen  "The most futuristic sounding song. Abe and I created the drum loop - its a crazy, bionic rhythm. I wrote a seedy guitar line over it, and worked with Scott Weiland (Stone temple pilots) on the vocals for the bridge. he came up with a really cool harmony for me to sing"   Teenager "This song, originally derived from a Crook sample, had almost no real instrumentation. So when I heard the kids from Idiot Pilot covering this live, I got the idea to re-record it with them. The song itself is super simple, but I think that's what I love about it. The lyrics were all written when I was 15 and living in Arizona with my grandparents. It's pretty much about my first and only real date I ever had. It's kind of corny, but it was the first time I got my heart broken."   Also:   Teenager  "This was originally a team sleep song. its acoustic and electric, with pink floydy keyboards. kinda trancey. lyrically, its a teenage love story, which sounds pretty goofy, but its actually alright"   Elite Elite - "Probably the hardest song we have ever written. its really straight forward and doesn't have typical deftones dynamics. its just heavy. I use a vocoder which gave my voice a demonic robot effect"   Pink Maggit "It starts off really spacey and freaky with just guitars, vocals and turntables. then it turns into just me, and ends up a triumphant anthem about being on top of the world and feeling like the coolest kid in school" Deftones/Self titled: "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.” . . . . .