LOST & FOUND

Stone Temple Pilots’ Dean and Robert DeLeo take you inside Perdida, a lush, densely layered, complex record that pushes the boundaries of what an “acoustic album” can be.

- Richard Bienstock

STONE TEMPLE PILOTS’ new record, Perdida, is the first full-length effort from the long-running rock act to have been written and recorded primarily on acoustic instruments. But as bassist (and sometimes guitarist) Robert DeLeo explains, even when the band is at their electrified heaviest, their music always beats with an unplugged heart.

“For me, all songs start on an acoustic,” DeLeo says. “Even going all the way back, whether it was ‘Plush’ or ‘Interstate Love Song,’ I wrote those on acoustic and that’s where it all began.”

His brother, STP guitarist Dean DeLeo, concurs. “You probably wouldn’t believe me, but I wrote ‘Meatplow,’ on an acoustic,” he says, referencing the excessively grungy leadoff track to the band’s smash 1994 album, Purple. “It’d be the last song on earth you’d think started out that way, but I happened to be sitting there, I felt this little kind of thang come over me, I grabbed the nearest guitar and out came that lick.”

Robert picks up the thread. “Then, after a song is written, you have a decision to make about whether to keep it in that acoustic state or to electrify it. And sometimes the result is a heavy song.”

But this time, he says about Perdida, “I think the sentiment was to keep everything in that sort of acoustic, ‘writer’ mode.”