"I showed up with Tibetan Singing Bowls, some percussion instruments and champagne, and asked them permission to do some experiments." The strange story behind Deftones and Maynard James Keenan's incredible collab, Passenger

At the most basic level, the lyrics to Deftones’ Passenger are about having sex in a car. As the song emerged from a fevered interplay between Chino Moreno and Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, however, there were always going to be different levels of metaphor and meaning at play. Some fans have read the song as a meditation on relinquishing control: giving in to the thrill of the new. That would certainly be apt as the track emerged from the chaotic, drug-fuelled sessions that spawned White Pony – Deftones’ transformative third album and a turn-of-the-century art-metal masterpiece.

The Sacramento band had already established themselves as a unique proposition with 1995 debut Adrenaline and ’97 follow-up Around The Fur. They’d been lumped into the nu metal scene prevalent at the time but in truth they always stood apart, with a less predictable atmospheric churn accompanying the crunch. White Pony still threw an absolute curveball of expansive ideas and sonic experimentation.

“We came off a couple of records that were pretty successful, but I felt like we had a lot more to do,” Chino told us. “A bigger voice, and really no rules.”

Of course, there’s a vague concept of having no rules and then there’s Maynard James Keenan. The Tool, Puscifer and A Perfect Circle frontman told Revolver that he turned up under the impression – rightly or wrongly - that Deftones were battling with writer’s block and turmoil within the band.

“So I showed up with Tibetan Singing Bowls, some percussion instruments, champagne, and asked them permission to do some experiments,” he explained. “I had them each switch instruments, play on the bowls, take one loop and try some improvisation. Things of that nature. The look on their faces was priceless. I might as well have been wearing hippy beads and bunny ears. I could just feel Stephen [Carpenter, guitar] thinking, ‘What kind of acid trip crap is this?’”

“At that time he was in Los Angeles. When we were there, he was recording the first A Perfect Circle record, so we were both in the midst of working on these records. We’d hang out a lot,” recalls Chino.

“I remember one day he took me to [Tool’s] rehearsal spot, and their room is tiny. You could barely have standing room. And Maynard grabbed the microphone and he just started singing. I was sitting literally three feet away from every band member, and they were playing one of the songs off the Aenima record. I was just thinking to myself at that moment, like, ‘Man, any Tool fan I know would shit their pants right now to sit here in the middle of this.'”

Deftones - Passenger [Official Visualizer] - YouTube

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Maynard wasn’t the only creative influence on the sessions. The White Pony sessions were the first to feature Frank Delgado as a full-time member of the band on synths and turntables, as well as Chino taking up the guitar – a development that initially caused a lot of friction between the singer and Stephen Carpenter.

“I think that really benefited the record, because there was no way you were going to have this linear-sounding thing, when each of us were trying to see how far we could push each other. Our relationship started to be strained a little bit at that point, but musically I think we prospered,” he says.

The album also ended up with a trio of unplanned guest appearances. Rodleen Getsic, who starred in extreme horror film The Bunny Game, provided the stunningly unnerving screams in Knife Prty and late Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland appeared on Rx Queen. Maynard’s turn on Passenger was undoubtedly the most high-profile, however, as well as the only real duet and full writing collaboration.

According to Chino, the Tool singer had been around when Deftones initially wrote the song in 1999, prior to demoing for the album. The day before vocals were due to be recorded, Chino invited him back to the studio to collaborate.

“We sat next to each other in front of the control board, and put the music on. It was really cool the way we wrote it – we shared a notebook, and he wrote a line, and I’d write a line, and then I’d hand it back to him to write a line, and he’d hand it back to me. So the way you hear the song on the record is pretty genuine to the way we wrote it, where we trade lines. We didn’t really have an idea for what we were making a song about, we just started riffing off each other,” Chino recalls. “Even to this day, I don’t think I’ve worked that way with anybody. I was super-stoked with it.”

And so he should have been. The result was an exhilarating collaboration between two of the most inventive forces in heavy music and song that, while never released as a single, remains one of Deftones’ most revered moments.

You can order two special vinyl variants of new Deftones album Private Music through the official Metal Hammer store