Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter has spoken further about his struggles with Type 2 Diabetes, a condition he unknowingly was suffering from for several years before finally getting diagnosed around 2024. After revealing that he hit bottom from the as-yet undiagnosed condition that year, he was encouraged by his bandmates to seek proper medical help.
In an interview with Zane Lowe conducted last summer, Carpenter revealed that up until that point, he had never had a doctor, though the eventual diagnosis of the disease prompted him to rectify that matter. Speaking now with Premier Guitar of the disease and how it affected him during the writing and recording Deftones‘ latest album, “private music“, he shared:
“I had no clue what I was going through. I’d just been so out of it for the past four or five years—all the things that go with poor diet and poor exercise, that’s what I experienced.
During the whole writing process, I was just tired, but I was not connecting how I felt to what I was doing. When we went in to start tracking the music, thankfully we got all of our scratch tracks done, because shortly after that, something had got me all messed up. Like, every day, I was just shy of crying from pain that was in my right arm. I couldn’t even move it.
I did what I could to just take care of myself—at least as best as I understood what I was going through. And thankfully, when it was time to actually track my guitar parts, my body was feeling better, and I was able to physically do what I had to do.”
Despite the worrying signs presented above, the 55-year-old Carpenter attributed his health woes to his advancing age, rather than any underlying medical condition. “I just thought it was old-man life sh*t.”
“I was self-medicating, hoping I was doing the right thing, and always hoping things would get better so I wouldn’t have to do any of that. But unfortunately, you can only kick a can so far down the road before you run out of road.”
As for how he feels now after getting help for the disease and adjusting his lifestyle, he offered:
“I’m very glad I got help. Type 2 diabetes was affecting me on a number of levels for a long time, and I’m grateful to have that information now and be able to deal with it. I’m also really grateful to everyone else in the band—their positive energy really carried me through that period of time, and really carried us through the making of the album.”
His health journey has also afforded him an amusing anecdote, as he stated:
“I’ve had two MRIs in the last year, and each time, I found myself thinking, ‘Man, how can I bring a recorder in here and record it?’ The sounds those machines make are so wild. The techs were like, ‘You can listen to music while we’re doing it.’ And I’m like, ‘No—I want to listen to the machine!’”
This same discussion mentioned above also saw Carpenter cite 2012’s “Koi No Yokan” as his favorite album to play from the Deftones catalog, stating in part, “‘Koi‘ is our record that I enjoy playing the most; I have the most fun playing those songs, physically speaking.”
