"Urantia" could easily be mistaken as a simple love song if not for the funky title, which is the key to open up this music box with.
"Urantia" refers to The Urantia Book, a book on metaphysics and cosmology (or "woo woo spiritual stuff" as some prefer to say it) published in 1955. The book explains that Urantia is another name for Earth, but it presents a view of our home planet very different from what we're normally taught. It teaches that Earth isn't the real reality but is instead a kind of illusory classroom where we come as differentiated beings who emerged purposefully from the undifferentiated source of all existence. We came here to learn and, in this classroom, the people we meet and especially the people we love share a connection that goes beyond this life. It is, in fact, eternal. In the afterlife, The Urantia Book claims, we will again come face-to-face with our family and friends. The theme comes through in this song as Deftones lead singer Chino Moreno smokes the lipstick-stained cigarette of a former lover and assures himself that they will meet again.
I'll find you again somewhere, I believe
You'll find me somewhere again, I believe
But the song seems to be about more than just reuniting with former lovers in the afterlife.
Tempt my spirit within my name
We crawled in the tomb and release some honey
1800 million ways striving to make it last
This song didn't escape the notice of The Urantia Book Fellowship, who wrote
their own analysis of it.
Moreno is hardly the only musician who's been influenced by The Urantia Book. Among those who have mentioned reading the tome are Jimi Hendrix, Willie Nelson, Leonard Cohen, Jerry Garcia, and the King of Rock and Roll himself, Elvis Presley. Guitar legend Steve Vai wrote "Midway Creatures" (from his 2005 album Real Illusions: Reflections) about one of the sections of The Urantia Book.
Talking to the BBC Radio 1 Rock Show, Moreno explained some of the sensory details in the lyrics. "I live on a lake," he said (Moreno lived in Bend, Oregon). "I ride my bike around it a couple times a week [or] walk around it. It's like a seven mile kind of loop. But I talk about circling around the lake, this is all like literal things that I was seeing from like digging into the ashtray and pulling out someone's cigarette and lighting it and taking a drag - very descriptive kind of things. Although it's all made up, it's kind of fun sometimes when you can do that as far as be very, very descriptive. I don't do that all the time. That's kind of something that I really don't do that much. Sometimes my lyrics all look too camouflaged. So sometimes to be very descriptive is kind of outside of my comfort zone in a way."
Deftones mastered the
Ohms album in Los Angeles at the
Howie Weinberg Mastering Studio. Weinberg is one of the legends of the music industry. He's been involved in multiple Grammy-winning recordings and, over the course of a career that started in the mid-1970s, has worked on major projects ranging from Nirvana's
Nevermind to Metallica's
Ride the Lightning to Iggy Pop's
Instinct.
Like many Deftones songs, this one started with a Stephen Carpenter guitar riff. When Moreno heard it, he immediately replied with, "Yes! This is so like something that we all love but we've never really done."
Moreno wrote the lyrics to this one. The band as a whole wrote the music.
The song's ethereal shoegaze feel is owed to DJ Frank Delgado, who used synths and samples to create a dreamy tone underneath the otherwise heavy instrumentation of the song. Delgado started working with Deftones during the recording of their second studio album, Around the Fur, and has been a fulltime band member since the third, White Pony.
