Trivia / Deftones

• Ascended Extra: Frank Delgado was originally just a hired gun for the band who would handle the synthesizer and samples-based elements of their sound. He became a full-time member by the time White Pony was being written.
• Black Sheep Hit: "Back to School (Mini Maggit)". The song wasn't even supposed to be on White Pony and was created and released solely to get the label to shut up about a lack of a surefire hit (which it wound up being), and the band hated it from the minute that they recorded it. It still shows up on setlists infrequently, but Chino Moreno has made his distaste for the song no secret.
• Creative Differences: The struggles between Chino and Stephen Carpenter over creative directions for the band are the stuff of legend, and have led to many acrimonious writing processes (particularly on Saturday Night Wrist and Gore). The issue has historically been that Chino's preferences skew towards post-punk, shoegaze, and dream pop, while Stephen is almost exclusively into metal and hardcore hip-hop, and what Chino wants (delicate, ethereal melodies and layered atmospherics) is almost never what Stephen wants (heavy riffs and screaming). It first manifested on White Pony, which was the first album that Chino took a really active role in writing for, and the two got into many arguments over the creative direction, as Stephen wanted to make it their heaviest album yet, while Chino wanted to make a much more diverse and varied album.
• Creator's Apathy: The group has made it clear that "Back to School" was strictly written to get their execs to shut up about the perceived lack of an obvious second single for White Pony after "Change", as the band and especially Chino considered the album complete and didn't want to mess with it. When they finally caved, Chino took the chorus of "Pink Maggit", slapped some rap verses on it, and had the band hop into the studio to record it, and by his own admission, the actual writing process for the song took half an hour at most.
• Creator Backlash:
  • As stated above, the band instantly turned against "Back to School" after it became a hit, and have more or less completely disavowed it. Notably, when the band held an online listening party for White Pony's 20th anniversary, they skipped over it and started immediately with "Feiticeira", while the 20th anniversary deluxe edition of the album omits the track entirely.
  • Chino himself grew to resent the Nu Metal label so much that not only did he go on to distance the band from the genre in later works, but also went on to burn bridges with his former peers such as Korn. That said, Korn (particularly Jonathan Davis) and Chino have since made amends^note Largely because their feud with each other was fueled by Chino's well-publicized struggle with alcohol and drugs, and he was bitter going through a tough time when it happened.
  • Chino has gone on to bash Saturday Night Wrist, calling it "fucking horrible" and saying recording it was the worst time of his life. He has softened on it somewhat over the years, but he still sees it as a fractured, piecemeal Frankenstein's monster of an album that was cobbled together from the best of what they could come up with while working around him and then had the vocal tracks awkwardly shoehorned in at the eleventh hour because he was in his own world.
  • Chino also dislikes the band's debut album Adrenaline, and has called it an amateurish release from a bunch of unfocused kids who were in way over their heads and had no idea what they were doing, and almost seemed surprised at how well it turned out given how unprofessional and immature they were at the time.
  • Abe Cunningham stated that Eros was "not that good" and implied that they were still in a fractured and dysfunctional place when they were making it.
  • The band feels embarrassed by the cover for Around the Fur, featuring a downward shot of a wet, bikini-wearing woman's cleavage. Possibly adding to this was the fact that she was a random woman who they met while partying, and Frank Delgado was originally next to her in the back cover photo — they opted to have him Photoshopped out rather than have to explain to his wife why he was in the hot tub with a strange woman.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • The band went through this during the recording of Saturday Night Wrist, almost breaking up due to internal tensions. It was especially bad for Chino, who was also dealing with drug addiction and a collapsing marriage. The music reflects this occasionally, such as with the line "I hate all of my friends, they all lack taste sometimes" from "Hole in the Earth".
  • Several tracks on Diamond Eyes, particularly "Diamond Eyes" and "976-EVIL", are about Chino's reactions to Chi Cheng's car accident.
• Development Hell: Eros, which was recorded and implied to be in between Saturday Night Wrist and Diamond Eyes. When Chi's accident occurred, the album was instead shelved and was intended to be worked on when Chi were to recover. Unfortunately while Chi did recover for a while, he sadly passed away in 2013. The band has expressed interest in releasing Eros with Chi's final parts, but it's unknown when that'd be the case. Chino did release a song from Eros called "Smile" but was removed by Warner Bro. At this point, the band's silence on the matter and lack of any meaningful news in years can be taken as a sign that they've abandoned the album and have no intention of ever releasing it. "Smile" saw a surprise live appearance at Dia de los Deftones 2019, and the band has indicated some desire to get the album's legal status sorted out and cobble together the stronger tracks into an EP (as the album was never finished, and the songs themselves were apparently of mediocre quality), but no promises have been made.
• Executive Meddling: During the making of White Pony, the record label demanded a more commercial single and complained that the band had "lost their heaviness" (despite having songs like "Elite" on the album). The result was "Back to School (Mini Maggit)", which has seen significant Creator Backlash from the band.
  Chino: This album right here [the White Pony re-release] is not the album that we turned into the label. As far as we're concerned, the first edition was the record. Done. Then they talked us into re-releasing it with another song on it, and it's not like I'm against the song or whatever, but I liked the sequence we had when we first turned it in. When this version came out, a little part inside all of us felt like: 'Fuck! We just totally compromised.' And I know that a lot of our fans felt bad about it, too.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Inverted with Sergio Vega, as they were all fans of Quicksand and counted them as an influence.
  • Filmmaker Leigh Whannell (Saw, Upgrade, The Invisible Man) was reportedly a fan of the band before being approached to direct a music video for them (which ended up being "Ceremony"). The opportunity was initiated by Whannell tweeting his praises for Ohms, calling it "excellent" and "probably [his] favourite Deftones [album] ever".
    "One day I wrote on Twitter that I was loving the new @deftones album. The next day their manager sent me a DM asking if I wanted to direct a music video for them. I said yes. The moral of the story is talk about the things you love on Twitter, not the things you hate."
• Referenced by...: Knife Party derived their name from the White Pony track.
• The Stoner: Stephen Carpenter. He claims that smoking weed helps him write music.
• Throw It In!:
  • Annie Hardy's "greasy, filthy handjobs" monologue at the end of "Pink Cellphone" was an in-joke (you can actually hear laughter in the background, and Hardy audibly tries to refrain from laughing herself throughout the monologue) that Chino threw in because, in his opinion, the record was already a patchwork clusterfuck, and having a huge Big-Lipped Alligator Moment would be consistent with the feel of the record. He just had Hardy (who had a notoriously bizarre and perverse sense of humor such that Chino knew that whatever she came up with was going to horrify and probably disgust people) stop by and come up with the most ridiculous shit that she could muster.
  • Chino stated that this was how his vocals were recorded on Adrenaline and Saturday Night Wrist. The former had at least a third of the album improvised on the spot; according to him, he was so nervous when he went into the sessions that he straight-up forgot to write lyrics for those songs, so he just sang the first thing that popped into his head and then figured out what he recorded later when it came time for live rehearsals. The latter, meanwhile, had Chino write down whatever came to mind at the last minute after all the other music was done, as he had been in his own world for most of the creative and recording process and hadn't cleared his head until the Team Sleep tour, and by the time he got back, the album was almost done save for vocals and he didn't have time to think it over too much.
• Troubled Production: By their own admission, the recording process of Saturday Night Wrist almost broke the band up. Moreno's excessive drinking and drug usage and failing marriage distanced him from the rest of the band, and his well-documented creative disputes with Carpenter and general disputes with producer Bob Ezrin put even more stress on the band. The result was a short hiatus that was probably the only thing that kept the band together and allowed them to deal with their problems.
• Working Title: "MX" was originally titled "Max", since the band thought the main riff sounded like something Max Cavelera would write.