Songfacts®:

• "Cherry Waves" is about loyalty and trust. How far will a person go to save you? All the way? Deftones frontman and primary lyricist Chino Moreno explained, "This is a story about being in the middle of the ocean with someone saying, 'If you were to sink underneath the waves, then I'd swim after you. Would you do the same for me? It's seeing how far the trust goes."
• The question left for fans has been: who was Moreno thinking about when he wrote "Cherry Waves?" It's widely assumed that at least the seed of the song, if not the full fruit, was inspired by Celeste Schroeder, Moreno's first wife, whom he married in 1994. They divorced in 2006, and Deftones fans see marks of the stress and pain of the crumbling marriage across this song and all of Saturday Night Wrist, Deftones' fifth album. The marriage was dissolving as they recorded. Moreno hasn't verified the first-wife assumption, but this is one area where fan gossip seems to add up.
• While this song is only suspected to be about Moreno's first wife, we know for certain that "Mascara" captured the friction of the couple's early years together.
• Some fans have interpreted the "cherry" description of the waves as describing blood in water. While that's certainly possible, the word "cherry" is also old(ish) slang for something new, flashy, and in pristine condition.
• In a 2006 interview with ultimate-guitar.com, guitarist Stephen Carpenter said that he played drums while writing the song with Moreno, patterning the music after a Swedish band named Refused. As the song started to come together, regular Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham stepped in and provided his own version as Carpenter got on guitar.
• On September 7, 2025, Sarah Barthel of Phantogram joined Deftones to perform "Cherry Waves" in Quebec City.