John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers Returns, Part 2 | Broken Record (Hosted by Rick Rubin)

foreign [Music] today we're excited to bring you the next installment of our John fuschante interview series John first came on the podcast back in April for the release of unlimited love then he was back a few weeks ago to pick up where they left off discussing Chili Pepper history one album at a time this is part two of that conversation and it's shaping up to be a little bit different this time around instead of talking Chili Pepper history John picks up his guitar to walk Rick through his pre-show warm-up he also demonstrates how he came up with the now classic major to minor chord changes on under the bridge they of course talk return to the dream canteen their second number one album in six months and they also discussed how Jon was able to overcome his desire to impress others with his guitar playing while recording Stadium Arcadia spoken record liner notes for the digital age I'm Justin Richmond here's Rick Rubin and John Frusciante from Shangri-La so there's a new Chili Pepper album that just came out yeah second one in a year yeah second one six months we really think of them as kind of two halves of the same thing because we recorded them all at the same time and I think the second one's probably like the more eccentric kind of strange one if I had to generalize but I was looking at a list the other day that I've made when we were trying to figure out what songs are going to make it on you know and what songs are and and I had a list like songs that feel like to me like that my image of the second album you know and and songs that sound like when I'm picturing the first album feeling like and While most of those songs were on the album they were on there were songs that were the second album vibe that we wound up putting on the first album and first album five that we wound up putting on the second album so to me they seem pretty balanced between the two things but but I think the new one goes to further extremes both in like heaviness and in softness and and like weirdness and all that then I think some of my favorites are on the second one but I like songs on both yeah that was really the the problem was was like 17 songs just weren't enough to satisfy any of us like like and some of your favorite ones didn't even make it on the second one those were some of your very favorite ones I know yeah so it was really it was really hard to like to satisfy everybody yeah so so it it seemed essential to us to at least have have the two records yeah because the making is similar it's same it's they were all recorded at the same time yeah it's hard to talk about in interviews when they're the when they were made at the same time but as it turns out the second one has a to me has a sort of a feeling and a sound that it could have been recorded at a completely separate time like it has a to me it has a spirit of brightness and fun where unlimited love has kind of a darkness and a seriousness I think a lot of the tunes that stood out to us as being like important sounding songs were some of the darker more serious ones and some of the ones that we felt more comfortable we were saving have like a light Vibe That's Not absent of meaning or anything yeah just more playful but yeah more playful yeah I I see the second one is as I hear it as being a brighter Vibe and a more fun vibe I remember I I was classifying songs as like I just think I just said pop Funk art I think I just made it as simple as that like and there was the most of Pop there was the middle of was Funk and the smallest amount was Art but yeah and I just think we we evenly distributed them but I think we got better at the mixing process as time went by and that sort of gave the second record to me like production wise sound wise it's it's got a distinct sound to it I I would also say that if anyone liked the first album they're gonna like the second album it's like the same diary entry you know that that however long two years of writing you guys were writing for about two years you oh no we wrote for nine months only nine months amazing yeah and then the the recording I think for like 50 tracks we did we did the basic traction three weeks of of everything we did pre-production though in the studio before we started right recording for real right yeah there was about a month of that yeah yeah because then by the time we did the real recording it it was more focused on just getting the performance we weren't working weren't really working on the songs it was just more the feel and the performance yeah that's true and I think that's historically the way we've we've always done it it's like we usually when we're recording we kind of know what we're doing by then yeah it was it was different in that we were for for me and that we were in a studio even though we were just basically there to work out arrangements with you like usually you would have been in in the rehearsal studio with us and instead we were here at Shangri-La yeah yeah how did you decide to release the second album so soon after the first album well I think our original idea just wasn't possible Anthony and Floyd really wanted to just release a giant album it would have been like a four everything four four records set and two double CD and they were really big on that idea and it just turned out that wasn't going to be possible mixing wise we didn't have enough time to get an album out before the tour was scheduled in order to do that not to mention the record company wasn't crazy about that idea and it seemed like a pretty wild thing to do but I think they like the idea just because nobody does that so the the second best idea which I I I'm pretty sure Anthony even wanted when he found out we couldn't do that he was like well could we have any other album come out two months later wow it was a bit basically as soon as possible was the yeah the idea so six months wound up being the reasonable thing and the possible thing because mixing wise we needed that extra six months oh let's talk about the covers I I don't know anything about this but I know that the cover of the first album is one kind of image and the cover of the second album is a very different kind of image yeah and I felt like that wound up being good it wound up reflecting the the musical difference that I feel in the two albums as well and kind of kind of a heavy thing yeah the first cover came from Anthony had an idea that the asterisk with the black background would be the basic idea in some kind of neon light but what he was getting from the record company wasn't fulfilling his vision and so he passed it on to Marcy my wife and they started talking about it and we started taking these references there's this Christian Church that you see from the freeway going into Hollywood from the valley it's a it's a big sort of neon sign and that wound up being kind of the basis then we you know Marcia got a help some help from somebody she knows designing what the sign would look like and then it got passed on to some other people who actually built the sign to be photographed then we had people to move the sign somewhere where it would be good to to shoot it that might have been the top of the Roosevelt Hotel so there's a physical there is a physical object it's not a CGI exactly cool so yeah so that was the first that was the first cover and then the second one we we had done a video uh with these animators that Marcy knows these French animators Tammy and Julian who did a video for poster child and a song from the first record and they didn't have much time to do it it winds up looping at a certain point it was because releasing two records and so quickly like this in succession we've had to rush through several stages of the process and I feel like we came up with good things under the pressure but it was it's been hard like it's just now that this record is out like starting to feel like lightening up even though we've just got off five months of tour but that whole time there's been constant stuff going on other than just preparing the second place yeah and her and Anthony had actually had the same idea independently of each other use the animators to make um cover that has a lot of different images and that's colorful and that our main reference we were thinking of covers like Funkadelic Cosmic slop cover but there's several covers that I can think of ones we weren't even using but that I think have been in that same category like Frank Zapp and the Mothers of Invention had an album called once size fits all it's got like a couch and it's got a cigar and it's got you know some outer space themes like just these kind of cartoon-like covers and so yeah it seemed like that idea fit in really well with what the vibe had turned out to be of the second album kind of more colorful so they put that together and we actually made two covers there's one for the indie record stores that there's a limited amount of and then there's the cover for the uh the normal cover and those are two completely different covers cool how do you think about sequencing an album I guess I think of it on a lot of levels like it was that's why we had to do the voting that we did was just because like we'd recorded like 48 songs that we had finished vocals to and uh I knew that at the most you know only like 34 we're going to be able to be released on two you know double record sets so that was really hard when you don't even know what what songs the two albums are going to consist of you know but for sequencing an album I have certain things like the first song has to sound like a first song the last song has to sound like a last song and you know the middle of the album should feel like the middle the you know the it should feel like it's gradually revealing something and it's always worked out and working in collaboration with you and with the other guys that like some of my favorite songs have gone towards the end of albums even though we do try to stick some of the best songs in the front like I always feel like the end of an album should really be delivering things that you didn't expect from the whole rest of the album there it should still be revealing itself on the fourth side when you think of it in vinyl when you think of it as four sides it's not the end of you know yes it's the end of the album but it's the beginning of the last part because of the experience of the vinyl yeah vinyl changes everything yeah I always thought of you know growing up with vinyl I always thought of albums as two sides and you know there's the first side has an ending and then the second side starts and then that has an ending and in streaming it's not like that it's just one long album yeah and it's just different it's just a different way of thinking about it and but the way most people digest it now is the streaming way but there is something to the art of the sequence based on the vinyl there's like a tried and true feeling about that most of the things that I stream that I originally heard on vinyl I don't mind that there's not a side break you know from the a side to the B side of the album but there's still things that help you sequence the digital version about vinyl like the halfway point like the end of the second side is usually the end of the halfway point yeah and so it's cool if the album sort of feels like it restarts halfway through it's a good effect for the for the last song on the second side to to feel like an ending and for the first song on the third side to feel like a beginning and if it's a CD or a digital download version that you still sort of get that by the album just seems to rejuvenate itself about halfway through yeah it's interesting for for artists who've never worked on vinyl they probably have a whole different relationship to sequence and I imagine some of them who really grew up on playlists don't even think of the sequence as anything it's just a bunch of songs because you can kind of make your own you know you can make your own version of it yeah in anywhere you want there is some magic to it when you hear songs in a certain order you relate to them in a different way and sometimes you know the wrong song in gives you an impression of an album that doesn't start you off on the right foot or the opposite you can hear you can hear a great song and if you don't like the second song then it's like a film of like oh maybe it's just one song that I like of this band you know that's the first thought that I would have if I love the first Solomon I don't like the second song that's there's already a red flag of like I might not listen as open-mindedly to the third song yeah after not liking the second song yeah interesting just the psychology of the order of songs how does that relate to doing it live how does sequencing work live and is there ever does it ever not work like do you ever decide on order to play the songs and then you do it and it just doesn't feel right I guess that's a big difference in our band is because live Anthony's always been completely in control of the set list the rest of us might make comments he might even show it to me before we get the copies printed out just just to get approval or something but we pretty much let him be the master of the set list and that's just always been how it's been whereas when we're making a record it's more collaborative it's kind of impossible for a large group of people to make a sequence because it kind of requires there's still more personal it's a personal decision a lot of my memories of doing it like in the old days of me and you you would drive around and you would have me in control of the CD player going from this song this ending scene yeah feeling what works does the transition work does the feeling work yeah there's so many things to keep on your mind I feel like it's a real multi-level thing you have the end of one song has to sound good going into the beginning of another you yeah you might make a set list that on paper seems like it would work really well and then as soon as you hear it it's like none of these transitions are making any sense you know that's an interesting thing about Anthony too and it makes sense because of everyone's job because he's relying on his voice there's probably a pacing that makes it able for him to get through a show yeah that no one else has that same consideration yeah I'm just thinking there's so many new songs to play there's 17 new songs that that is new to the audience there are the 17 songs that the audience has heard six months ago and then there's the 40 Years of music that the Chili Peppers have made yeah how do you uh keep a balance of playing things that people are you know expecting to hear and all the things you want to play and how are new songs received compared to old songs live how does that all work I think compared to other bands who have a history like we have the new songs get a really good response but especially black summer you know like I can't always tell because in my in-ears I don't have the audience super loud like like they might be might be a large percentage of the audience apply plotting and just because of where the mics are that I get the audience from I might not even hear it you know I take the in-ears out and I it's always like much more deafening screaming and stuff than I than I can hear but yeah the new songs go over good but like there's there's certain songs off unlimited love that I really wish we were playing that just were some of the more challenging ones to do when we were rehearsing and we never took the risk to play them live I see and there's other ones that we did take the risk to play live and only played them a couple of times and then gave up sticking to the ones that were working better you're not worried about mistakes live in front of people I'm actually way more worried about mistakes when I'm in the Studio or even when I'm rehearsing live you're not super worried about mistakes and at the same time the feeling of a song not working yeah is fine when you're at rehearsal because you know it's it's leading somewhere and you're everybody's figuring if he's figuring this thing out Chad's figuring that thing out I'm figuring it out another but to have that experience live when the four elements aren't functioning as a single unit yes it really stands out in a show and it makes you feel really crappy to be up there yeah when they're not aligned when you're playing them next to these songs like Californication or other side that you have played a lot and you can really have fun with and everything's always locked together no matter what so that's why it's good we have this week of rehearsal coming up so we can start we can work on things that that we were not feeling up for taking the risk to play but try to get them together from unlimited love and great Return of the dream canteen been better and luckily we have a lot of hits I guess that's what helps at this point is that sure you tend to want to mainly make it about playing the hits when you're playing the 50 000 people a night and stuff but the new songs are definitely accepted and black summer gets pretty much equal response to to any of the hits we've had before so amazing people who are there often coming to me after the show like wow people are cheering for your new songs just as much as the old ones so I can't always tell but but I have got that gotten that feedback from people cool yeah did you play songs from the new album on the five month tour uh no we we just started playing our first song from from Return of the dream canteen yeah we just started playing it just a few shows ago we've played it like three times cool uh Eddie but we rehearsed those a lot when when we were rehearsing before the tour started but after five months of being on tour and not playing those songs it just felt too risky to start playing them we wanted to start playing them when the album was announced and but it just and when the first single came out and stuff but it just felt like we would have been taking too big of a risk for the energy flow we just wanted to be as good as it could be yeah we wanted we want them to sound good so it won't take us a lot of rehearsing to get them back under our fingers but we're gonna take like a week before we go on tour again great makes sense just be again the volume of material there's so many songs yeah it's hard to keep everything straight it's impossible yeah and just live you've got to find your voice when I'm singing harmonies on the record that could be like 20 voices and then I've got to do it live in one voice you've got to figure out okay what's which one do I do at this chorus which one do I do with the second chord you know you try what kind of voice do I sing in and maybe it's not maybe it's completely dissimilar voice to what I did on the record at all just to make it make it work in the live context so are there other things like that tell me about things that can happen on record that have to be rethought to be able to do it live I guess for me multiple guitar parts is often a thing it's not usually too hard for me to figure out but that's always something to consider whether to to to duplicate the effects sometimes it's better live to just not have any effects and maybe on the record I did some modular synth treatment to the guitar that worked really well for the recording but might not be necessary for live like and might not even be able to be able to hear it through the nature of a big sound system outside yeah it's like it's a much it's louder but it's lower resolution I think yeah and there's a lot more natural Ambience so things yeah you know on the record we were doing all kinds of fancy reverbs and things and on the guitar and certain drum hits and little things like that like live we've got so much natural reverberation playing generally we're playing stadiums that I I have Reverb pedals I don't even and I think I turned them on like twice per show or something and I would and I I did a lot of like slap back delay because I was listening to a lot of 50s music when we made the two records so a good percentage of songs had slapback delay on the basic track of the guitar but live there was just no point like yeah the the arena creates a slap yeah and you can't control the the speed of it yeah so I got real used to playing the songs dry you know and like I have a big pedal board and it's generally because there are certain songs that I would like to have the option of using a certain pedal board if we would do that song so I'll have a pedal that's just in case we play one particular song but generally like I don't know that's how Jimi Hendrix was live on the records there's all kinds of signal processing to the guitar and stuff and and to the whole band really and and live it's just either Distortion or semi-distorted clean sound and the rest you do with your energy and your you know you have a whole added energy that goes into what you play live that and the visual part of it the movement and the energy transference with the audience that like I feel like all that you use effects and things on a recording to make the recording feel like it has a lift to it that those other things bring that lift live and you don't need to use those decorations tell me more about the energy transference with the audience because that's that's a really interesting feeling most of us who don't get on a stage and play in front of you know tens of thousands of people don't know what that feeling is like how would you describe the difference if you guys are playing in the afternoon in the same venue empty and then when it's packed with screaming people how does it feel different for one thing you're hearing everything at a slower speed than you're actually playing it because you've got adrenaline going I see you think you're playing at one tempo and you're actually playing at a faster Tempo than that and so it's something that I remember early on when Chad was in the band in like 89 we started really zoning into it listening to watching videotapes of ourselves or listening to cassettes and we realized wow okay yeah everything's too fast like let's let's figure out like how we can how it can sound right to us on stage how to bridge that gap between between uh what it appears to be live and what it actually is taking into consideration the audience has probably also got some adrenaline going for sure so so you don't need to try too much to slow it down but you've got to make sure not to get carried away with yourself live to be conscious of like going if it feels even a little fast you're probably going very very fast yeah you know so that's one difference is every you're hearing everything different I noticed that for the first time when I was a kid I used to go running and I'd be listening to music all day and then I'd go running and then I'd come back to my room and be doing like sit-ups and stuff and and I put a record on and it sounded too slow and and I had I couldn't account for it I didn't understand what it was that was happening but then I remembered it later when we noticed it live everything was faster so it's you're going faster than your normal perception of time [Music] so that's one difference and I think you also play you play harder and like I've always played completely differently live than I do on records like on records like Californication and by the way in particular like I was really playing in the style that I felt served the songs well and that I felt like I was doing something with rather than a blues kind of basic sense of Melody or a rock basic sense of Melody I was listening to synth pop a lot and I see that style of Melody that sort of begins with craft work and continued into the 80s with Depeche Mode and things like that being its own specific form of Melody and I was trying to apply that a lot to the music that we were doing while still having a rock energy and so I was playing in a in a way that it had a kind of a Simplicity in common with that kind of music you play melodies that that try to say a lot with with every note being in its perfect place but creating a sort of a shape with the notes and uh not so much putting a lot of expression into the notes but trying to find notes that paint a sort of a good picture in the song and carry on for the melody with another when he's not singing carry that on with another Melody that's just as catchy as what he's doing but live throughout those times particularly by the way I was playing live like in a very like flashy putting a lot of expression into it way it's just that's what the audience brought out of me I couldn't keep the same kind of restraint live that I that I could for uh for the studio what is your pre-show ritual like I have all these ways of of doing scales that are creative when I was a teenager I would just play them in the normal way you play them or a couple of variations of that but as I've gotten older it's a way of putting my creativity into my instrument that has nothing to do with the sound that comes out because my playing I'm I really believe in the philosophy of you play what's what sounds good you don't you don't play something because it's physically interesting or anything like that or impressive or anything like that so I I have these warm-ups that are really based on okay let's forget about the sound that the instrument makes what's what's doing something unusual with the fingers that they're not accustomed to doing and how can I play games with my brain with the exercises that teach me things about the nature of the 12 note system that we all use yeah that's going to be challenging for my fingers as well as for my brain rain and so over the years just because I I do it all the time I did it a lot even when I wasn't in the band for the 10 years that I wasn't in it I it's just it's interesting to me to look at notes in these various ways so I've come up with a whole series of of things that are challenging and that I always learn from having to do with the organization of notes in relationship to scales and different kind of scales and I'm just always improving on it no I'll get little Inspirations from it from like I'll watch you know a guitar instruction Thing by John McLaughlin or Alan Holdsworth I watch one John McLaughlin thing I got I think that got me through like six years of practicing and then and then one Alan holder thing like wow went to the next five years like I I see I see what they're talking about in there and then it makes me think of new ideas yes about about how to approach scales and exercises just from little thing one little thing they say might might give me a whole stream of ideas that like I'm doing the same thing every day and a year later I get the idea but what if I did it this way what if what if I had what if I twist it in this direction or something and see if I give you a guitar could you give me a demonstration of just how that works I could try yeah let's try it I'm curious to hear it okay so here's an example uh with scales if we if we do something like take four notes and I'm playing them now with no accents it's four notes but if now I'm going to start accenting it in threes [Music] and if you look at that the accents once you start doing that pattern the accents went lowest note highest note second highest note third highest note fourth highest note it creates a pattern you've got four notes and let's call this one one two three four but if you play them in threes the pattern winds up being four one two three four one two three and that's just something that exists in nature having to do with the relationship of Rhythm and Melody cool so if we take the same four notes yeah and and instead play them in fives like and so it's four notes but we go [Music] so again we wound up with the same accenting pattern of it went from this note this note to this note to this note to this note it keeps going in kind of in a circle yeah you know and again if we take three notes and divide it into sevens and we go [Music] so so yeah it's hard yeah like that it seems exhausting also yeah so so that's just that's trying to show like show it in in one in one position yes um so you do that in Scales is what I do so I'll take like a series of notes like say going down in sevens so that's just going down in sevens [Music] and there's a certain interval jump if you're going if you're playing a seven note scale and you're going down in sevens you're always jumping up a sixth interval whether it's a minor or major six up a six up a six so there's this shape that you see in it [Music] that's the distance that you're that you're that you're jumping up every time you go down in sevens on a seven note scale it that's you know in this case a major based on a major scale so now I'm going to go down in sevens but I'm gonna I'm gonna accent in fives Okay so [Music] so it's so difficult especially with numbers like fives where it's not like uh the even numbers seem to feel more comfortable yeah if you're doing two buttons or threes or fives your picking hand is going is going down per accent then up for an accent then down for an accident up for an accident so that's another good part of it is to get your upstrokes feeling like a solid accents as as your downstrokes so that's like a good example of the kind of things that I do but you know it gets harder and harder the larger the the distances and the bigger the numbers are like I generally when I practice I'm probably staying in numbers under 10 both in terms of number of notes maybe 11 but it's hard to go like go down 11 notes and and accent and 13s there's a pattern to it but it's much it's it's really hard to do it it [ __ ] you up you start hearing the notes as dictating the Rhythm and that's what the exercise in general helps you not do is to for a moment moment while you're practicing disconnect the Rhythm from the pitch don't let the pitch determine the the Rhythm I'm pretty sure from all the music that I've learned and everything that Melodies that are interesting and Melodies that don't just feel average have interesting ways of acting in a way that's rhythmic separately from the from the melodic that the two areas are sort of functioning independently of each other yet in harmony it's not it's not just the order of the notes it's an artery the order of the notes and where the accents are yeah and and and how the Rhythm relates to the note some when you think of like songs like Mary had a little lamb or something it's almost like the notes and the Rhythm are just a hundred percent like lined up with each other yeah and and when you get more you know Melodies like the Beatles or something like that where where you wonder where this melody came from it's because it doesn't have such an obvious relationship between the Rhythm and and the notes there's something creative going on in their spin on it so so that's why I feel like those exercises do have an effect on one sense of Melody in one's awareness of because you know normally you can't you don't a note is the Rhythm and the note and it's where it falls in the in the bar and where what bar that is in the song all those things make a note what it sounds like to us yeah like I said it's not music it's purely for the physical part and the brain's conception of the relationships notes to each other and the relationship also of Rhythm two notes yeah to me practicing and making music there are these two completely separate things I don't feel that you need to use what you practice in your music or apply it in any way it's really they're two separate art forms and I think you should look at practicing as its own sort of cool art form so when you do your rehearsals do you do with an acoustic or an electric electric electric because it's the guitar you're going to be playing or it's like it's like the guitar I'm going to be playing so I I start out with various exercises and scales and then I move on to playing along with things that I like and I try to play along with certain things because they're good for rhythm guitar certain things because they're good for bending and doing vibrato things that have solos so I like playing along with oh I have a lot of things memorized right now that are they're mostly things that people improvised on a record and or live and and so I have these solos by some of my favorite rock guitar players and usually in my life I just learn a stream of things and I gradually forget things as I learn new things but at the moment it seemed best for my fingers if I were to only on show days play things that I know really well that I can play that I should be able to play without making mistakes so I've got a number of things memorized that I can do that with and I like to spend a couple hours doing that before the show nothing is as crazy as what I do on stage because a lot of what I do on stage I wouldn't even know how to figure it out myself uh it's just pure a pure energetic transmission yeah a lot of people would call it sloppy because you can't hear it doesn't so much sound like no no no no no no no no uh a lot of time there's some weird noise that you're like well I'm not sure where his fingers were there but like I really like the sound of those things and I like playing like that you know if you would have listened to it could you tell what you were doing or or maybe not even here it with most any guitar playing like like Frank Zappa is a guitar player who I would put in that category like a lot of what he plays I think it's a matter of opinion what he's actually playing two people could figure it out and do it two different ways a lot of it's just not clear enough some of it is and then he goes into a section where it's just like well we can only guess what he's doing at that point and in his case does it always sound intentional or no he definitely would admit to making what he called mistakes to me there's no mistakes the sound he made is the music and there's nothing it should have been you know yeah yeah but he may have been trying to do something different yeah he was trying to do something different and he doesn't quite make it and that happens with these guitar players who go out on a Ledge like Jimmy Page Jimi Hendrix they all have sections like this that it becomes hard to be sure exactly what they're doing but I try to learn things like that but a lot of what I'm playing live is stuff that there's no level of confusion about it and it just it's a little beneath the level of what I'm gonna do when I get on stage but I find that if I do it for a couple hours that prepares me it's like a meditation and it's like if I find that I'm making mistakes on something that I've played a zillion times perfectly yeah and I'm forgetting it to some degree or my fingers aren't cooperating with me it shows me I need to bring an extra Focus to that thing so cool yeah they're so interesting yeah I asked because because some of the craziest solo that I've ever seen somebody transcribe and this is how I learned how to read music when I was a kid was because I was so fascinated by The rhythms in them where Steve Vai had done these transcriptions of Frank Zappa's guitar solos there's a whole book of them wow and I had no interest in reading music but when I learned that there was this way of writing down when people are speeding up and slowing down across the bar line and when they're going into grooves that seem completely separate from what the drummer is doing but do have a relationship it was fascinating to me and it was really the only way to learn a lot of Frank Zappa's written music was to understand how it was written down because he would use those kind of rhythms both in his playing and in his writing so I learned how to read I just went directly to what turned out to be like the hardest stuff to you know to sight read and consequently I never learned to sight read but I asked Steve Vai because I think a lot about polyrhythms I use them a lot in my electronic music I have machines I can program where you're playing like five against four or evenly or seven against three or these strange ways of of rhythmically relating to the other instruments so I'd given a lot of thought to it for so many years and I asked him does he think of them as objectively accurate and he said it was a matter of interpretation yeah when you're writing rhythms like that and the drummer is not playing to a click but he's himself is slightly speeding up and slowing down all the time it's very hard to say the Rhythm right here is the rhythms are all based on a 13 evenly across four quarter notes yeah there's no way to accurately to be able to to objectively say yes that is the Rhythm because as long as when you're dealing with rhythms that are that delicate to play accurately the slightest little bit of timing change in the drummer even a really good tight drummer makes the difference to where it's not what you what you conceived it to be I think all that studying of Frank Zappa's music that I did when I was a teenager did a lot of good for me because it showed me that not everything needs to line up perfectly rhythmically with everybody else the way most people tend to play and Melodies don't have to be this straightforward thing in order to be accessible or to be catchy that that you can be doing little twists with them all the time and taking all those Liberties that he was taking like and studying them I just I just feel like gave me a sort of a unique outlook for a pop musician on you know on what notes are there for and what what you're able to do with them I feel like even in the simplest things that I do I feel like that familiarity I have with doing things in an unusual way winds up making The Melodies unusual you know in some weird way do you feel like if it happened that you were playing a concert and it came time for solo and if for some reason something happened where the audience could still hear you perfectly but you couldn't hear yourself at all could you play a solo without hearing yourself at all and have it be coherent for the audience I think so you know it that kind of happened at the LA show that we did a few months ago I got on stage and there was nothing in my ear monitors at all they were they were silent and so I went over to the side of the stage and it just sounded like a mess up there we because we all use in-ear monitors we what it actually sounds like on stage is pretty incoherent so I went to the side and was telling my guitar tech telling the sound man what's going on they're watching them try to solve the problem and I went into playing a two-handed tapping Eddie Van Halen style uh solo yeah barely could hear what I was doing but after the show my my wife's cousin said uh that's solo at the beginning of the show incredible but yeah I could barely hear what I was doing but I do that kind of thing when I'm it's part of my practicing that when I warm up I I also do things like that like just doing this at every part of the neck that that I just doing these Trails like everywhere that I can did Eddie actually invent that Technique No he invented that use of it like nobody did it sounding like what he sounded like doing it there's certain details about patterns like like uh like nobody was doing that but Steve Hackett from Genesis was doing that using his right hand finger to tap notes and Frank Zappa was doing the same thing but using the pick rather than like that's what it sounds like with your finger [Music] that's with a pick and so he was calling that bagpipe guitar and that was a good both those examples were a good three years before uh Van Halen did you know if those influenced Eddie like did he hear those and then come up with his way of doing it he claimed he came up with his on the toilet while he was taking a [ __ ] good story but he went backstage at a Steve Hackett show and told Steve Hackett that he got the idea for it from being at a Genesis show and saw him doing it so I tend to believe that but Steve hackett's definitely doing it on Selling England by the Pound The Genesis album he's definitely doing that technique you can hear it yeah when you're soloing live how much do you take into account the recording version of the solo usually not at all yeah like sometimes if I'm in a certain mood I'll do a variation of it like I'll I'll do the same basic idea or I'll start with the same idea but usually that's even how it is on the record like people think of the solo on a record as being the one but it was actually I had an idea of how I would start it and that was all I had and that was the one that you picked that day or may have been the only one you played in some cases like just to be prepared for the studio I often have an idea for a beginning and I figured the rest I'll just get through and it'll be reflected in the vibe of the moment so live a lot of the time I might start that the same way that I did in the studio start with something that that's pre-written and then go and go off in another Direction because it's always going to feel differently depending on the groove of how flea and Chad are playing to play the same solo it seems like it would be unnatural when you have a song in your head let's say you're bringing a song into the band you've worked on at home has there ever been a case where you you come up with a like a part that you're gonna play a rhythm a rhythm piece and you play for the band and they join in and when they join in it instigates you to change what your original part was based on what they're playing oh yeah completely and and Anthony's always the last part of that like like I don't really know exactly what I'm gonna do and and how the how the groove is going to be put into it and all that uh until I hear what he's thinking but there is a certain amount of I bring in a song If the drums that Chad aren't playing don't sound right I might not have any idea of what the drums are supposed to be going in but when I hear the wrong thing yeah it feels like this doesn't make this thing do what it wants to yeah you know we often experiment yeah we work on that and so there's there's always a lot of healthy exchange with Chad with flea that that's been more difficult we've had rough patches of working together because I had an idea of what I thought should be the the low note of the chord and that kind of thing and he just hears a difference yeah but you know we we managed to work that out always when he brings in a song either on piano or on bass do you immediately know what to play quite often especially if it's a sort of modal Funk based kind of thing that doesn't involve chord changes a lot of the time the first thing I play when when I come in is what winds up being on the record but with piano with with those songs that he's brought in on piano I I definitely have to like put some thought into it and ask him what the chords are we had a real nice exchange because in the old days neither of us really communicated having anything to do with Theory it was more showing the person what you're playing and then responding to that but as time's gone by and he went to music school and stuff for for this new stuff we would talk about the chord he would if he didn't know the name of the chord or one of us doesn't know the name of the chord we uh tell the other one what the intervals that it has in it are and when it involves chord changes that's really where the trouble where where it involves more it's just you got to figure it out yeah you've got to take some time yeah but yeah usually the songs that are jams Style song songs that come from us just jamming with each other that's usually pretty automatic and but sometimes you know like some songs on the new album were like we did a jam and the first thing we played is one song and what we went into 10 minutes later wound up being a completely other song like we landed on something through playing the first thing that wound up being a whole other tune so so there's this automaticness of fitting together when it's when it's things that are in one key but but when it's moving around a lot it requires some thought both for him to come up with bass parts for me to come up with guitar parts if there's a difficult chord progression presented to You on piano with your instinct first be thinking about how to interact with it or would it be to play along with it like to double it first to know what to do off of it from piano I can't do that because she's got he can play more notes than I can on guitar on piano it's so easy for instance to play a chord that's almost everything in it is a whole step away from each other it's a very close distance yes guitar you just can't do it you can't you've got to take notes out of the chord in order to be able to physically play it I see so so you can't really duplicate it on the guitar right yeah not if it has too many notes in it he's doing a lot of chords that have 10 notes in them I see don't even have that many strings or that range and it comes down as always to doing what you hear in your head you know but for chords to do what you hear in your head you have to have a good idea of yeah because that's one of the things I was thinking was when you hear something and you respond to it are you responding with the guitar first or are you humming it in your head and then playing it with the singing version be faster than the guitar version to sing the idea or no yeah it's an interesting question because it comes back to that thing that we touched on in the last episode having to do with that period of time where I was seeing music very clearly in my head with synesthesia or some form of synesthesia and even though I don't have that the way I did when I was you know in my early 20s I do see things in I can see for instance like if I'm playing live the beginning of a guitar solo I'm not humming it I just see it wow when you say you see it you don't see it like written music no would you describe it as shape how would you describe it that's the funny thing about it is it's not visual at least I don't think it is but it's in an instant like I might see two bars of a of a guitar solo of the way I'm going to start the solo of I might see the first two bars in my head as a single picture like as a but how would you describe a single instant I see those two bars but when you say see the two bars tell me what you're like describe what you're seeing what do the bars look like I don't know how I I really it's are there not words for me because I know it's interesting it's one of those things that because I could do this kind of thing so good when I was when I was like 20 and I was literally seeing everything like as a movie that like you'd ask me like you'd have the idea like we would be working on shoulder squeeze and I remember you saying you should write a guitar intro just a guitar only intro for this song and I would just see a picture in my head like a visual picture like a movie of the song and I would think okay what would be the right movie for the intro and then I would just see the movie and then play the feeling almost like this movie like you're scoring an image yeah but it's not an image that you could necessarily describe not necessarily but it very well could have been in those days they were they were there were things that were very clear but they always there was this interaction between the music and the visuals in my head to where if I was hearing music I saw a visual that perfectly represented that music and it could be abstract shapes in black and white or it could be color just like a movie or it you know it was and so as time went by and I went Californication time I started making music again but without that clear visualness I still had the same ability to see the feeling of Music in my head yet there was no picture to it but I could see it I can only describe it as seeing because yeah it's there in my head and it's clear and I see the connection between that and what I would play to do that feeling yeah but sometimes there's a visual thing but it's more like spaces than it is like objects okay and when you say spaces do you mean spaces between things or a visual space like uh a location I'm not really saying that it's anything that I could expect anybody to be able to draw or something yeah it's just the absence of objects I see as opposed to objects it's a it's something like you've seen what's missing you don't have time I'm curious just as you're asking me these questions you must have something like that no I don't know I'm trying I'm trying to visual I'm trying to visualize what you're experiencing right and I'm just looking for any clues to I want to see it you know I wanna I wanna see it yeah pretty mysterious I think I told you I think I told you when I was gassed at the dentist's office I told you that story a long time ago needle phobic I got gas to have a blood test and I was listening to music and they gasped me and I could see the music I could see 3D images and I remember thinking oh now I know how to do this because like now that I've been exposed to it yeah I don't need laughing gas to do this I see what this is right and then I've never been able to do it again even not on laughing gas I can't I've never been able to do it again right but in the that first time I was able to clearly see and it was so cool yeah it was so cool to be able to see it yeah that's how it was for me real consistently from like 1990 91 92 it's mysterious to me that that I was able to make music just as colorful and and and emotional and and uh shapely and all these things without it yeah and I can only say that even though I don't see the visuals yeah like I did they must be there just below the level of Consciousness because the effect of what that did remained with me when you could see it maybe it was almost like training wheels like it had to be that clear for whatever it was that was showing it to you yeah for you to be able to see it and then once you built the ability to see it you could still see it without the visual there right yeah it seems to me that that is that that is what happened and uh I'm sure there are people who just go on seeing it their whole lives but it didn't work that way for me but yeah there are a lot of ideas don't you get it say for instance you're looking through movies you're thinking of watching a movie and you look through your DVD collection there's nothing nothing's leaping out at you all of a sudden One dvd that's the one you want to watch yes what happens in your head at that moment I would say it's a it's a feeling of the energy in my body raises it's similar to when we're playing in the studio and it goes from a okay take to a great take there's this feeling of just like I feel this lift of energy in my body that makes me want to sometimes makes me want to laugh sometimes it makes me want to lean forward and like listen closer I would say it's interest it's like you could be sitting around in like mindlessly not thinking and then something grabs my attention right nothing changed volumes are not any louder you know it's like it's not like the music came on music's been playing for hours but all of a sudden like my attention gets drawn to this thing right and um it's this wave of energy I guess is the way to say it right and see from for me that's a part of it but another part of it is there's something that presents itself to my mind that it's as if it's a condensed form of the feeling of that thing yeah so like if if I'm looking through my movies and Good Fellas is the movie I want to watch the feeling of Goodfellas comes over me in my head and before when I saw things visually that would have been a much more extreme like somehow visual concoction that's that I literally see but in this case I don't see it but I feel it in my brain yes I'm in it next time that I'm choosing something to watch I'm going to really pay attention to what's going on in my body to try to understand what I'm feeling you know I know I know the feeling of when I get excited oh there it is yeah that feeling yeah I'm gonna try to uh tune into that more it's interesting that you say in my body because it's just for me it's more like it's more in my head yeah for me it's not it's definitely not in my head right it's not a thinking thing yeah for me it's a whole body feeling draw interesting yeah yeah so that that's what makes me think it's still left over it's simple things like that when I'm looking through my record collection I see the record that I want to hear the feeling of that record is produced in my head yeah as if in one moment I were feeling the entire listening experience of listening to that record the sum of that the feeling of the Holograms like where the each any aspect of it contains the whole yeah yeah so so that ends up relating to what we were talking about in terms of when flee plays a bass line I see in my head what would be the counter to that what would be the balancer to that where where are the holes in that and I see a picture of it in my head of what what would balance his Baseline and I just start playing and that balance is what I play so I'm not thinking of notes in advance but sometimes I do but it's in that way that I that I was saying where like I see them but it's faster than real time I see the whole pattern that I'm going to repeat in an instant you know we're we're only really taking note of what's Happening consciously all the time but I think just as much as dreams are are this world that we don't really understand I think everything in life is that there's some sort of subconscious yes uh Echo that's taking place to what we're seeing consciously absolutely and I think what we're seeing consciously barely scratches the surface of what's going on yeah there's too many data points we can't take it all in yeah and and you know that period of time that I mentioned in the last show where I had several months when I first got off drugs completely of just being kind of bored during that period of time when nothing was happening I was seeing the music that I might make with the band in my head I guess in some cases I might have actually been hearing music in my head but a lot of it was just the overall concept of the way that the things would relate to each other and I'm just bored like just sitting there like not not doing anything not excited about life or anything but oftentimes when there's nothing going on your subconscious reveals itself to you in these ways like that's the time when it does it if you're constantly having information in front of you all the time or constantly doing things to entertain yourself or to combat that distract yourself yeah like oftentimes you're not going to be able to to be in touch with the subconscious that has its own movement and it has its own reality and a lot of the time it seems like in that particular case like that period that I thought nothing was happening with me my life was going nowhere it actually had a huge effect on the on something very productive that I did which was making that record you know would you describe it as a premonition I guess so I guess I've had a lot of a lot of those in my in my life like you can imagine something and then it ends up coming to pass yeah like I see something yeah sometimes I see things in things that they have nothing to do with me and then all of a sudden I see the real thing or I hear the real thing I realize oh my God I heard that in my head like 10 years ago yeah like that dice album that you brought over in my house the day the laughter died part two yeah there's moments on that that I swear I heard in my head when I was 14 years old like seven years before it came out I I know I understand that feeling because sometimes I'll hear something and they'll be and I know I've never heard it before or it was even possibly here before but there's such a feeling of remembrance when I'm listening to it or just uh sense of yes that's how it goes do you know what I mean like like I already know it yeah a knowingness yeah there's and there's some kind of connection between memory and creativity there's a connection between them yet creating something new isn't the same thing as remembering something no but no in some ways that's that's it's useful that it's not the same because yeah we remember something and then we make it then we realize oh that's not what it was at all it's like it is something new yeah but there's a connection between the functions in the brain and and it it shows in sometimes like the Beatles had that thing with Ringo uh they would make fun of him because every time he'd try to write a new song it was a song that already existed he thought he was writing a new song and they would start falling on the floor laughing because it was a it was a Jerry Lee Lewis song or whatever and you just didn't realize it was and oftentimes when when I get an idea for writing a song it feels like I'm remembering something it doesn't feel like I'm coming up with something new what's turned out to be the most beneficial kind of practicing for me is that I'm just creating a sort of an encyclopedia of what has been done yes and that's all being stored in my subconscious I learn if I like a song I learn how to play the guitar of it I might even learn how to play the keyboard of it and the base of it and this information is all stored in my head so when I write I'm drawing from that store room of all the stuff that of all the combinations that you've ever heard yeah over the course of your life and that you get to a stage where okay I have this and I want to go to this and there's somewhere and you may it may be conscious or unconscious yeah like this sound going to this sound feels satisfying yeah and maybe that's because there's a something you heard 25 years ago that you liked and lodged but don't REM you know don't remember the specifics of it yeah like if you eat a good meal you feel satisfied yeah and the same when you hear a good piece of music there's this feeling of satisfaction yeah and you know the different elements all of the elements over the course of your life that have given you that feeling of satisfaction are all at your disposal to draw from whether you remember them or not they're somehow in there yeah they change us yeah for me that's the productive thing is just to have them all in there and you're like doing this mixing and matching thing it's really more your subconscious doing it because like for instance like we were talking about under the bridge like when Anthony had that vocal and I basically had the idea to just do something starting with them in a major key just because what he was doing seemed sad and I wanted to cheer it up a little bit because aside from it being soft that was another aspect to it that was weird for us our music was generally uplifting yeah and and it was a sad song yeah if I sang The Melody of that song you hear the chords in your subconscious you'd hear the melody now you know now that you know what it's supposed to be but when he was first singing it we didn't know of course it wasn't it wasn't super clear whether it could have been anything yeah yeah it could have been so so I know that that was my thought going into it aside from the Jimi Hendrix thing was just the thought like let's lighten this up a little bit you know and and when it moved to a minor key for the chorus of the song and the idea to have that part start on the later than the one instead of the one I drew from this song that I knew in my head at that moment I could have thought of any song but I thought this would be a nice little moment to have this space right before the court you know in a lot of ways that's why I think learning a lot of songs is really the only way to yeah to develop your skill doing it because when it's happening it's not like a skill that you you know how to use the hammer in this particular way so you use it the skill is like sort of giving your subconscious the ability to be able to offer you the right thing at the right time yes you know and sometimes and giving it loads of options to choose from exactly loads of options yes do you remember the song that inspired you to want to put that in under the bridge right do you remember what it was yeah can you play it okay so um do you mind if I play a whole verse and a whole Choice anything you want exactly I can do it instrumentally if it's no good that way but uh but it seems I'm all anything you want to play is fun okay I'm gonna try this um so the Joe Jackson song goes one two three four [Music] who lives upstairs is [Music] [Music] they say he changed his name cause someone with the same name made it first his girlfriend comes to stay we hear her screams and think that they rehearse [Music] so maybe it's a play and maybe someone's really getting her look around every Hometown every night's house every Fair Deal in every good job every Square me in every dream home a nightmare foreign [Music] just um guitar one two three four one [Music] foreign [Music] sounds like it's answering something it doesn't sound like it's saying something yeah that that's the way that that chorus gentleman goes with his it's a long uh it's just a stop and then goes into the chorus but with ours it's uh it's a sustain right yeah yeah we hold we hold the cord which came from this which even that in itself came from another song There's this T-Rex song called ripoff that goes like it's cold it's funny it's called I thought it really at the time that was a joke in my mind like it would be cool if I ripped off rip-off yeah but yeah like it it has this cycle in the verse that goes like uh uh [Music] so so I always thought that was cool that that the verse had this break in it where the guitar just played this major seven chord yeah so in ours when we got to the end of the to the to the verse and that's the happy verse yeah and then when he got to the end of the singing rather than just going straight into the chorus when we went [Music] and then the Joe Jackson yeah but but instead of doing that I went [Music] sounds more to me that that sounds more introspective than the verse did yeah yeah like like it was almost like in the in the writing of that song we we brought in the darkness gradually like to me the end of the song the [Music] that's the darkest part of the song yeah you know like like that was the feeling to me when Anthony first brought it in but you got to it instead of opening with it exactly like like gradually and and which gave it the effect of somehow feeling triumphant rather than feeling like you're a release some kind of a release yeah rather than feeling some kind of rather than it feeling like a downer it made the whole thing made it made the chorus felt like an uplifting thing yeah we had another song earlier uh on the first album that I did with them knocked me down where that [Music] it was a guy I might not be in the right key [Music] we had we had this thing that went major chord to minor chord and it's just one of those things that I've no there's a lot there's certain songs in history where somebody does that where I just noticed yeah that that it's a good feeling and uh that's another thing I ca because I know so how to play so many songs I have things categorized in my head to where there's all these sort of chord progression there's a lot of songs that have similar chord progressions and so I have them sort of on in on some level maybe not to where I can just play them right off the bat but they're the principles at work yeah they're cat they're categorized in my head as being oh that's that type of chord it's rare that in a rock song from history I would hear a chord progression I would go oh that that doesn't fall into any category you know but there are some especially in progressive rock and stuff so yeah like under the bridge was just another attempt at doing the major to minor chord [Music] but taking time with it and I think Beatles did that too you know the major the minor I'm sure they yeah they definitely did like like uh let's see I was playing along with one the other they a lot of the time it's like they already went to a F chord say they're in C and then they went to an f and then and then they went back to C and then next time they do an F - it's minor and all of a sudden that gives you a different feeling like it's a chord you've already heard as a major chord but then the second time they go to it it's a it's a minus the color of it and it changes it yeah can you think of any songs that from the exercise that you showed earlier of the notes and Rhythm yeah any songs that you've written that have come from something related to that notes and Rhythm Technique No definitely can't like I said I really I think of practicing you think of it separate it's completely separate I'm not trying to connect the two things I do know that when I'm playing on stage it's not going to stop me from doing a certain thing that I want to do in my solo if all of a sudden I have to do up Strokes uh and accent those rather than accenting the downstrokes like I'll be able to say whatever that thing is I wanted to say or if I want to fit a strange amount of notes in the bar if I want to do if I want to fit seven notes into the four four instead of eight notes or whatever like it's natural for me to do that but other than that I figure it just it gets in there somehow but I don't know how for sure okay this is a good question based on that you want to get seven notes into a four you're doing a solo what happens you're hearing the music you start the solo what dictates what where the next note it goes like what's happening yeah no it's yeah like like I'm like you can explain it after why yeah but not in the moment yeah there's no time yeah I I think of it as you're placing yourself in a few points in time at the same time like I think if you can do all three of those things at once be in the past be in the present and be in the future yeah that that's something like the ideal frame of mind to be to have some kind of a preconception about what you're about to do yes to be in the moment listening to what everybody else is doing right at the right in the moment at every point and also listening to what's just happened yeah I think it involves like a balancing of sort of being in those three points in time at the same time if a lot of the time you're only able to listen to what's just happened and you're just judging it every step of the way you're just going oh that sucked oh that was terrible wow like and you can't get out no that sounds crippling yeah it's bad that's what it's like when I'm having a bad show because I'm just listening to what's already happened I don't have any idea of what I'm about to do I'm not in the moment I'm I'm listening to what's already come out and I'm judging it I see but ideally you're in a balance between between those three points in time how often does that happen though bad show like for you a bad show like that I feel like that doesn't I've never seen that I remember even when we were doing the basic tracks to Stadium I was kind of in that state of mind while we were doing the basic tracks for a week or two and uh you just kept telling me like I kept telling you what I was experiencing that everything's sounding bad to me and you were like you're playing great sounds great yeah but but but like so it's just the it's your interpretation of what's happening it's what's happening inside yeah I was judging everything as I was doing it was so important to me to play in a certain way that I wanted to play on that record I was trying to have a little more of the looseness of live than I'd had on any of our records before and the energy of the live playing and I I think I'd put too much pressure on myself to where most of the record flowed out really nicely but the first week or two I was experiencing a really negative thing where I I was just judging every moment as it happened successively and I wasn't able to get into the groove I wasn't able to anticipate it I wasn't able to be in the moment and what do you think shifted it because he said it was for the first few weeks he's the meditation thing I did oh nice yeah it because there was a bad feeling in my stomach that was associated with the mental state and I did a guided meditation with somebody first I meditated on this thing in my stomach and then I meditated on he said there's a secondary part where where you're feeling a similar kind of unease a similar kind of pain try to figure out let's get off the phone and figure out where in your body is that and I found that it was this spot right here just my wrist uh on the opposite side is the palm of my hand yeah and back of the left wrist yeah it might have been both wrists but it was very subtle I would have never even noticed that there was a feeling there but when I tried to separate myself from the feeling of my stomach it was there and so I meditated on that for a long time and then I got on the phone with him again and then he then he said there's a third point you know I can't remember what it was but I went to but maybe it was the throat or something whatever it was and eventually a whole explosion of thoughts came out about a friendship that I'd had when I was young that went bad wow that was followed by a period of time of me intensely trying to play guitar in a way that impressed people and the way I intended to play on that record had a connection with that point in time that's what I what it was lodged in your body yeah and so I had some the the thing up in that way all of a sudden all these memories came back of this friendship that went back had and the desire to impress people that was followed like before that I was just more already just being creative after that I had a determined thing like I'm gonna play in a way that's going to impress people and that nobody's going to be able to tell me I'm not a good guitar player and all this stuff like which isn't possible like I've heard the people talk [ __ ] about the greatest guitar players ever whether it's Jimi Hendrix Jimmy Page Alan Holdsworth Ed Van Halen like I've heard loads of people say that they're bad guitarists you know like so you can't escape it so I don't advise anybody to ever if you're doing something new or going out on a limb if you're really going forward yeah there are always people who resist yes yeah they have no context for it you know so with everything I'd learned about making music for how it sounds and going with your feelings and supporting the your bandmates and all that kind of stuff when we went in the studio to do Stadium I was just kind of like I had this idea that I was going to play in a way that was gonna draw more attention to the guitar playing and I think I really had to get my ego out of the way of it like I feel like that's where the conflict came from that that caused the pain yeah I had to reel it in a little bit and just get inside the feeling of the songs and not worry about like the playing in a more flashy way was going to have to just come naturally it couldn't I had to get that because that's kind of what you're doing anytime that you're that you're thinking of a of a reaction that you want from people separate from the feeling it it's just that it never works yeah it doesn't work and and so so that's where I had some intelligent part of me telling myself you know this this you can't go down this path so it was a little conflict but once I had that memory and saw the relationship between those two things losing that friend and focusing on being impressive to other people I was able to go back into the record with my stomach feeling relaxed with being able to be completely in the moment without worrying about what people were going to think of it or anything and just uh doing what came naturally cool yeah I'm trying to decide if we want to start talking about the other albums or whether it's better to stop and do another one because I feel like again it's going to be long and I feel like we've covered a lot of good ground now what do you think yeah and you're around for a few weeks right I'm here for a few weeks and we can do another one before I leave town oh okay in person sure good yeah I don't mind coming out not at all okay because I feel like there's so much again it's you know I never know in the beginning but once we start talking it's like there's a lot to talk about and it's funny that we don't when we're working on stuff there's not much talk of you know we don't philosophize much we're you know we have a job to do and we're focused on doing the job so we rarely just talk about stuff yeah it's fun yeah well thank you so much for doing this yeah thank you always a pleasure talking to you I always learned something it's fun yeah it's a lot of fun talking to you cool so we do this again soon okay cool thanks to John fushante for stopping by Shangri-La to chat with Rick be sure to keep an eye out on our feed for their next conversation you can hear all of our favorite Chili Pepper songs on a playlist at brokenrecordpodcast.com you can follow us on Twitter at broken record broken record is produced with help from Leah Rose Jason Gambrell bent holiday Eric Sandler Jennifer Sanchez Predator Sophie crane our executive producer is Mia LaBelle broken record is a production of Pushkin Industries and if you like our show please remember to share rate and review us on your podcast app our theme musics by Kenny beats I'm Justin Richmond

Channel: Broken Record Podcast

Views: 153,502

Keywords: Broken Record, Podcast, Interview, Music, Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, How to Play RHCP Under the Bridge, John Frusciante, Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Frusciante Rick Rubin, RHCP, Red Hot Chili Peppers Unlimited Love, Red Hot Chili Peppers Rick Rubin, John Frusciante Interview, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Rick Rubin Interview, Rick Rubin RHCP, Anthony Kiedis, Music Podcast, Rock Music, new music, red hot chili peppers new album, rhcp new album, RHCP Californication

Id: kEEpo3MCY80

Length: 81min 8sec (4868 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 09 2022