Stone Temple Pilots Nearly Finished With New Album

Posted on Dec 15th 2009 2:00PM by Steve Baltin
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Scott Weiland has some good news for fans who've waited for seven years for new music from the reunited Stone Temple Pilots. "We're almost finished," he tells Spinner of the eagerly awaited Don Was-produced album. "There will probably be 11 songs on the record and we have nine completed already. Then you have to have B-sides for Japan, the UK and the rest of Europe, so we'll probably record 14 songs total."

The band apparently has found the same groove they brought to the reunion tour when getting back into the writing and recording. "It's always been easy. We have a method that we use and it's pretty basic," Weiland says. "For the most part, Robert and Dean [DeLeo] write the instrumental riffs and then amongst the three of us we arrange the songs and then I write all the melodies and the lyrics."

While Weiland wouldn't spill on any song titles yet, he is already looking ahead to playing the music live. "Yeah, there's a lot of songs that we're excited about because we just finished a long tour where we were playing the hits from all five records," he says. "It'll make it a lot more fun and gratifying because I know the fans love to hear the hits, but it's a more fun playing stuff you just wrote."

That's not to say the band hasn't been able to breathe some new life into the STP classics. "I think with 'Plush' I sing it a little more soulfully, it's got a little bit more of an R&B approach to the way I do the vocal than the initial recording," he says. "But songs evolve and the interpretations of the song evolve. 'Lounge Fly' has a feeling that's a little bit different, and that was on our second album, 'Purple.'"

Still, Weiland is sympathetic to the fact that people who come to hear the hits want to be able to recognize them, because that's how he feels as a fan. "Personally, when I go see a band play, I appreciate the artistic license to change arrangements up, but I think people still want to hear songs that are true to the way they sounded on the record," he says. "And you want it to sound good. When people change songs too much, it changes the feel and sometimes changes the emotion you get from the song. And so we don't really change things too much."