From returning to tube amps, to searching for soundscapes instead of songs and his power chord addiction, Deftones’ Stephen Carpenter has been offering great insight into the ins and outs of his guitar work on private music, the band’s highly acclaimed tenth and latest album.
However, Carpenter also faced several personal upheavals during the record’s writing and recording process. Namely, his undiagnosed type 2 diabetes placed a big toll on him – so much so that Chino Moreno had to handle more of the guitar parts.
“Honestly, it's crazy. We all knew that something was going on with him at the time. He was very lethargic during the writing sessions where he was there; he was present, but he just seemed run down,” Moreno reveals in a candid interview with the Broken Record Podcast.
“We'd start working on stuff, and he'd kind of come in, and he just seemed very slow. We got in a couple of arguments, a couple times where I was, ‘Dude, what's wrong with you? Do you, like, not want to be here?’ Then he would get mad at me and be like, ‘What are you talking about? How could you ask me if I want to be here? I'm here.’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah, I know you're here, but you don't seem interested in what's going on.’”
Soon, Moreno and the rest of the band realized that the problem ran deeper than they initially realized.
“We were playing Coachella, maybe a few months after one of those sessions, and we got off stage, and he just came up to all of us, and he was like, ‘You guys, I'm really sorry that I played so bad,’” he remembers.
“And honestly, I didn't really realize it. I noticed that he was a little sloppier than usual, but he's like, ‘I was having a hard time standing up. My hand wasn't responding to playing these songs.’ And so I was like, ‘You need to go figure out what's going on with you.’
“He's been one of those people who have always tried to self-diagnose himself. And I'm like, ‘Dude, no, you need to go to the doctor.’ So eventually he faced up, and he went, and then you just watched him change. Once he knew what was wrong with him, then he was like, ‘Okay,’ and then he started to figure out the tools to deal with it.”
As for what happened during those sessions, Moreno admits that, amid the rush to finish the album, he didn't even realize that he was picking up the slack.
“It was more or less like, ‘Okay, well, we're here and we're just gonna keep busy,’” he recalls. “So if he wasn't engaging, I would just be like, ‘Okay, here's an idea. Come on, let's go, boom, boom, boom,’ and then we just start working on stuff.
“But, before you knew it, we had almost an album's worth of material where a lot of it, he didn't spearhead because of what he was going through. So, in hindsight, yes, there was a lot more, I think, where I picked up slack or whatever, but I enjoy doing it, too... I wasn't mad about it.”
In other Deftones news, Carpenter recently explainsed why he's moved away from amp modelers and re-incorporated tube amps into his rig.
