“An emotional rollercoaster”: How Chino Moreno’s surprising favourite song shaped the sound of Deftones
One reason, among many, that the Deftones have outlasted most of their supposed nu-metal peers from the 1990s is that they never saw those other bands as peers to begin with.
“Somebody told me once that in this business you have to be a racehorse,” frontman Chino Moreno told the Philadelphia Inquirer back in the year 2000. “A racehorse wears blinders because otherwise it’ll see the other horses and get distracted and fall. You have to keep going on your own path.”
Moreno had already recognised, even as bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit were still thriving, that he couldn’t pursue any sort of proven formula in his songwriting, or try and re-create a sound that seemed to be in the zeitgeist. Deftones consistently zigged when other bands zagged in the 2000s, and rather than turning them into more of a niche band, that racehorse mentality actually elevated them on both the critical and commercial scales. The prevailing reason, even across a widely varying catalogue, is Moreno’s authenticity, his ability to express universally relatable frustrations, fears, and vulnerabilities without having to copy/paste his personal journal entries in the process.
“I don’t think you have to be the best lyricist or singer in the world to communicate,” he said early in his career, “Whatever the main vibe is of the song, you know when somebody believes in what they’re saying. You can feel it when it’s done with conviction.” Interestingly, one of Moreno’s life-long guiding lights when it came to performing with conviction is a singer not from the worlds of metal or hard rock, but pop and R&B.
When he was 11 or 12 years old, he saw Prince up on the big screen in the movie Purple Rain and was blown away. On a soundtrack full of bangers, though, it wasn’t ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, or the title track that stuck with him the most, but rather one of the record’s deeper cuts, ‘The Beautiful Ones’, which Moreno still proudly identifies as “my favourite song of all-time”.
During an appearance on AWOLNATION’s Totally Committed Podcast, Moreno described ‘The Beautiful Ones’ as “an emotional rollercoaster. Great vocals, music’s fucking beautiful… You really get the visual of what’s going on in the movie. It’s a real kind of transition in the movie when Apollonia first really realises that she’s really down for Prince as opposed to Morris [Day]. But he gets her with that song, and by the end, she’s just like tears coming down.”
Moreno loves the subtle ‘80s production touches on the record, as well, noting the little things in the music, saying, “I think it’s maybe two-thirds of the way through the song and there’s this keyboard, real sort of diminished keyboard that comes in… It’s an emotional tune, man.”
The connective tissue between a song like ‘The Beautiful Ones’ and Deftones tracks like ‘Digital Bath’ or ‘Be Quiet And Drive’ isn’t glaringly obvious, but Prince was certainly a songwriter who favoured a sense of conviction over a need to overwrite his words. He is a desperate, pleading wreck on ‘The Beautiful Ones’, breaking out his best falsetto as he asks, “What’s it gonna be, baby? / Do you want him? / Or do you want me? / ‘Cause I want you / Say I want you / Tell me, baby / Do you want me? / I gotta know / I gotta know”.
Compare that to these lines from the Deftones classic ‘Cherry Waves’: “If like, you should stay down beneath / I’ll swim down / Would you? / Is that what you want? / Would you? / Is that what you want? / Would you?” He might not be winning over Apollonia with those words, but the conviction is certainly there.
More than a matter of lyrical choices or vocal performance, what we’re really talking about here is “soul,” and it’s something that clearly was baked into the Deftones DNA from the outset; an idea that a song could represent a mix of emotions, a journey from anger to desperation or lust to resignation. The more agro elements of nu metal had their role in communicating those feelings, but Moreno wasn’t interested in hiding his vulnerability or being heavy for heavy’s sake, and that’s partly because of the lessons he’d learned early on from the Purple One.
