deafone

Lead singer Chino Moreno (on Maynard's appearance): "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."