10 Legends That Guested On Hard Rock Songs

There’s never an easy way to put Deftones’ sound into a neat box. Even though they may have fit nicely in the nu metal label at the time, their sound has touched on everything from shoegaze to pop music to even some ambient moods every now and again. They were always a metal band at their core though, and they touched on something a lot more menacing with Passenger.

As if the messed up stories on Change and Digital Bath weren’t enough, the entirety of this song takes place in a car, where you’re not really sure if you’re going to exit alive or not. There was something missing though and Deftones were visited by Maynard James Keenan from Tool in the studio to flesh out ideas. While he was originally there just to workshop the structure of the song, Maynard soon found himself behind the mic in the studio, taking a whole verse away from Chino Moreno as he wails in the same way that he did on Lateralus just a few months prior.

This wasn’t stepping on Chino’s toes by any stretch either, saying that he was absolutely psyched to hear their song get turned into a Tool track from the ground up just because of Maynard’s voice. You can argue that Maynard showed them up, but it’s more about that musical fingerprint. No matter how much you might want to show a different side of yourself, there’s only one person that’s going to sound like you.