Hot off of the heels of their freshly reissued 25th anniversary edition of 1992’s classic Core and finalizing their exhaustive singer search to fill the shoes of both Scott Weiland and Chester Bennington, Stone Temple Pilots have a busy future ahead. If bassist Robert DeLeo’s recent tweets are anything to go by, fans have even more to look forward to with a 25th anniversary reissue of 1994’s Purple.
Describing himself as “very proud of Purple“, which contained hits such as “Interstate Love Song”, “Big Empty”, and “Vasoline”, DeLeo told a Twitter user a reissue of Purple is on the cards and the band will be digging through the vaults. While many demos and other tracks that were included on the Super Deluxe edition of Core were leaked by dedicated fans over the years, what could be included on the hypothetical Purple Super Deluxe edition is mostly a mystery.
The band’s hit 1993 cover of Led Zeppelin’s Dancing Days never found a home outside of the Zeppelin tribute album Encomium. A cover of KISS’s “Watchin’ You” was recorded in late 1993 for the KISS My Ass tribute album and ultimately shelved.
Robert DeLeo discussed the new singer Stone Temple Pilots are working with in a new Rolling Stone article. While not revealing the name, he did confirm the singer is male.
“We’ve been working with someone – I don’t want to name names yet – and we’re making music,” Robert says. “I don’t know if he’s well-known or unknown; I don’t look at him as ‘well-known.’ But we’re writing music and we’re hopefully looking at finishing a record and putting it out soon.”
Stone Temple Pilots rehearsed with Jeff Gutt back in May, and former Filter guitarist Geno Lenardo was in attendance, and he strongly hinted Gutt would be the band’s new singer. John Borja has also been a candidate since 2016, and he recently hinted that he’d received good news. We’ll know soon enough apparently if it’s Gutt, Borja, or a wild card who will front the band.
Dean DeLeo also discussed Scott Weiland’s lyrics on Core, “I have to be very careful with what I say about Scott’s lyrics, because I don’t know how much Scott would really want people to know what he was writing about. He was a guy that kept his cards pretty close to his chest. I can tell you one thing, though: Scott was 23 years old writing those lyrics, man. When we were writing this record, and I say this with humility, we knew what we had was good because we were getting one another off.
I think that a lot of the lyrical content on that record was about the big question mark that stood in front of us about the future: What was going to happen to loved ones? What was going to happen to family? Where were we going to be? Were we going to be at home much anymore? When that record started taking off, we were on the road for 14 months and weren’t even home.”