Stone Temple Pilots guitarist Dean DeLeo told Rolling Stone in a new interview that in one of his final conversations with Scott Weiland, Weiland expressed a desire to re-record the band’s 1990 demo “Only Dying.” Dean said he had an idea to possibly re-record the instrumentals around Weiland’s demo vocals in the future.
“One of the last few conversations Scott [Weiland] and I had was that he really wanted to re-cut that song,” Dean says. “I said to Robert, ‘Maybe we should honor his wishes and maybe cut the band around that vocal.’ Maybe we’ll do that one day; I don’t know.”
Weiland died in December 2015. Many iconic bands have recorded music around vocals of their late singers, with surviving members of Queen, The Doors, and The Beatles doing that over the years. Stone Temple Pilots have other unreleased early demos including “Scary Area” that they could also re-record music to surround Weiland’s demo vocal recording.
Eric Kretz also told Rolling Stone about writing and recording “Only Dying.”
“We wrote it maybe nine months after Dean joined the band, and we recorded it in a studio in north Hollywood before we got signed,” drummer Eric Kretz says. “It’s cool to hear it now. You can hear all the STP elements in there. You could tell it needed to be reworked a little bit, but you can really hear Scott’s voice taking on its character and the band delving into the sound of the guitar, the special effects and everything. It’s a great early indicator of where the band was heading. It was trying to dig into our emotions.”
