It was reported yesterday that STONE TEMPLE PILOTS out of thousands of auditions had chosen X Factor season three runner-up Jeff Gutt, who now goes by his full name, Jeffrey Adam Gutt as the bands new frontman. The report came from a source confirmed to Entertainment Tonight. The band hadn’t made an official announcement at the time this story was published. Gutt also made an appearance on season 2 as well but was cut during the bootcamp round. Gutt was the singer of the California based nu-metal band Dry Cell. The band was active from 1998-2005 and then again from 2008-2010. STONE TEMPLE PILOTS’ rep has made the following statement to ET as of today. “The band has been rehearsing with several singers over the past few weeks.” So the wait is not over, and the band has not made a final decision on who will become the next singer of the illustrious band. Whoever gets the gig has some big shoes to fill replacing original singer Scott Weiland, and also former singer Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. The band has been in search of a new singer since February of 2015. Currently we are just few weeks away from the one year anniversary of Weiland passing on December 4th.
What we do know is that Gutt has been working with the remaining members of the band Dean DeLeo, Robert DeLeo and Eric Kretz for a period of time, but other singers have been as well. Early on rumors were abound that Filipino musician John Borja was the frontrunner, because he had made a trip to the U.S. and was shown in a picture with Robert DeLeo and Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen who are in a band together called Delta Deep. Other notable auditions include FUEL singer Toryn Green, Icelandic singer and Kurt Cobain look-a-like Einar Vilberg, Mick Blankenship, and tons more. It’s reported that Dave Grohl helped Stone Temple Pilots during the search as well. We would consider Jeffrey Adam Gutt and John Borja to be the top front runners for the position.
Jeffrey Adam Gutt
During his time on X Factor he covered the songs “Creep,” “Dream On,” and “Hallelujah.” In the beggining of the singer search Dean DeLeo said “You know, I promise you one thing: we’re not gonna settle.” We certainly hope that with all the time the band is spending on auditioning and vetting their finalists that they get exactly what they’ve been looking for.
During his time on X Factor Gutt covered the songs “Creep,” “Dream On,” and “Hallelujah.” Below you can see his rendition of “Hallelujah”, which is especially sentimental with the recent passing of the legendary Leonard Cohen.
