John Frusciante Returns, Part 2

Today we’re excited to bring you the next installment of our John Frusciante interview series. John first came on the podcast back in April to help celebrate the release of the Red Hot Chili Peppers album, Unlimited Love. Then he returned in mid-October to discuss Chili Pepper history, one album at a time.

On today's episode we'll hear John talk about the Chili Peppers brand new release—their second number one album in six months—Return Of The Dream Canteen. John also picks up a guitar and walks Rick through his pre-show warmup and demonstrates how he came up with the now-classic major to minor chord changes on “Under The Bridge.” And, he talks about how he was able to overcome his desire to impress others while recording Stadium Arcadium.

Stay tuned to the end of this episode for details about part three of what is shaping up to be an intimate series of interviews between Rick Rubin and John Frusciante.

You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers songs HERE.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. 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

(00:38):
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 a now classic major to minor chord changes
on Under the Bridge. They of course talk Return of
the Dream Canteen, their second number one album in six months,

(01:01):
and they also discussed how John was able to overcome
his desire to impress others with his guitar plane while
recording Stadium Arcadium. This is broken record line of notes
for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchell, here's Rick Rubin
and John Fuschante from Shangola. So there's a new Chili

(01:21):
Pepper album that just came out. Yeah, second one in
a year, Yeah, a 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 ones probably like the more eccentric,
kind of strange one, if I had to generalize. But

(01:44):
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 aren't, And I had a list like, songs
that feel like to me, like my image of the
second album, you know, and songs that sound like what
I'm picturing the first album feeling like. And while most
of those songs were on the album that they were on,

(02:05):
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 in like
weirdness and all that. And the first some of my

(02:27):
favorites were on the second one, but I like songs
on both. Yeah, that was really the problem was was
like seventeen songs just born enough to satisfy any of us,
like like, and some of your favorite ones didn't even
make it on the second one, and those were those
were some of your very favorite ones. Yeah, so it
was really it was really hard to like to satisfy everybody,

(02:50):
you know. So so 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 record
at the same time. Yeah, it's hard to talk about
and 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
few feeling in the sound that it could have been

(03:11):
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

(03:32):
ones that we felt more comfortable We're saving have like
a light vibe that's not absent of meaning or anything,
but yeah, more playful. Yeah, I see the second one
is I hear it as being a brighter vibe and
a more fun vibe. I remember I was classifying songs

(03:54):
as like I did. Think I just said pop, funk, art.
I think I just made it as simple as that.
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 even the distributed them.
But I think we got better at the mixing process
as time went by, and that sort of gave the

(04:15):
second record to me, like production wise, sound wise, it's
it's got a distinct sound to it. 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 are writing for about two years. Oh no,
we wrote for nine months, only nine months, amazing. Yeah,

(04:38):
and then the recording I think for like fifty tracks
we did, we did the basic traction three weeks 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

(04:58):
the time we did the real recording, it was more
focused on just getting the performance. We weren't working, we
weren't really working on the songs. It was just more
of the feel in the performance. Yeah, it's true, and
I think that's historically the way we've we've always done it.
It's like, well, 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 me and that

(05:19):
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 the rehearsal studio with us,
and instead we were here at Changer Law. Yeah. Yeah,
How did you decide to release the second album so
soon after the first album? Well, I think our our
original idea just wasn't possible. I at Anthony and Fully

(05:44):
really wanted to just release a giant album. It would
have been like a four everything, four records set and
to 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

(06:05):
to do that, not to mention the record company wasn't
crazy about that idea. It seemed like a pretty wild
thing to do, but I think they liked the idea
just because nobody does that. So the second best idea,
which 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?

(06:25):
It was a big Basically as soon as possible was
the yeah 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 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

(06:46):
very different kind of image. Yeah, and I felt like
that wound up being good at wound up reflecting the
musical difference that I feel in the two albums as well,
and kind kind of a heavy thing. Yeah. The first
cover came from Anthony had an idea that the asterisk
with a black background would be the basic idea in

(07:06):
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

(07:29):
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 Marcy got to 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

(07:51):
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 exactly. So yeah,
So that was the first that was the first cover,
and then the one we had done a video with

(08:12):
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

(08:33):
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 lightning 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 is preparing

(08:54):
the second Yeah, and her and Anthony had actually had
the same idea independently of each other. Used the animators
to make a 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

(09:16):
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 One 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,

(09:37):
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 normal cover, and those are
two completely different covers. How do you think about sequencing
an album? Yes, I think of it on a lot
of levels. Like it was. That's why we had to

(09:57):
do the voting that we did, was just because like
we'd recorded like forty eight songs that we had finished
vocals too, and I knew that at the most, you know,
only like thirty four 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

(10:19):
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 of the you know, the it should
feel like it's gradually revealing something. And it's always worked
out working in collaboration with you and with the other

(10:40):
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

(11:01):
four sides, it's not the end of the 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

(11:21):
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 lie 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

(11:45):
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 sidebreak, 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

(12:05):
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 last song on the second side to feel like
an ending and for the first song on the third
side to feel like a beginning. And if it's a

(12:29):
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 artists who've
never worked on vinyl, they probably have a whole different
relationship to a sequence. And I imagine some of them
who really grew up on playlists don't even think of

(12:49):
a 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 in any
way you want. But 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 them that doesn't start you off on the right

(13:11):
foot or the opposite. You can hear, you can hear
a great song, then if you don't like the second song,
then it's like a feeling 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 if
I love the first song, then 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,

(13:32):
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 an 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

(13:55):
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 to get approval or some thing,
but we pretty much let him be the master of
the set list, and that's just always been how it's been.

(14:15):
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 still more
person A lot of my memories of doing it, like
in the old days of me and you would would
drive around and you would have me in control of

(14:35):
the CD player going from this song this end. Yeah,
feeling what works? Is 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. Yeah, the
end of one song has to sound good going into
the beginning of another. You might make a set list
that on paper seems like it would work really well,

(14:55):
and then as soon as you hear it, it's like
none of these transitions are making any sense you. Yeah,
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 that no one else has

(15:16):
that same consideration. Yeah, I'm just thinking there's so many
new songs to play. There's seventeen new songs that is
new to the audience, there are the seventeen songs that
the audience has heard six months ago, and then there's
the forty years of music that the Chili Meppers have made. Yeah,
how do you keep a balance of playing things that

(15:39):
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, Like I can't always tell because

(16:02):
in my in ears, I don't have the audience super
loud like like they might be might be a large
percentage audience 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 inn ears
out and it's always like much more deafening screaming and
stuff than than I can hear. But yeah, the new

(16:23):
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. 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,

(16:44):
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 is fine when you're at rehearsal
because you know it's it's leading somewhere and you're everybody's

(17:06):
figuring at Flice figuring this thing out, Chad's figuring that
thing out. I'm figuring out another. But to have that
experience live when the four elements aren't functioning as a
single unit, it really stands out in a show and
it makes you feel really crappy to be up there
when they're not aligne when you're playing them next to
these songs like Californication or other Side that you have

(17:29):
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
we were not feeling up for taking the risk to play,
but try to get them together from Unlimited Love and

(17:50):
Return of the Dream Canteen and better and luckily we
have a lot of hits. I guess that's what helps
at this point is that you tend to want to
mainly make it about playing the hits when you're playing
the fifty thousand people a night and stuff. But the
new songs are definitely accepted, and Black Summer gets pretty
much equal response to any of the hits we've had before.

(18:14):
So people who were there often common to me after
the show, like, Wow, people are cheering for your new
songs just as much as the old ones, And 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? No,

(18:35):
we just started playing our first song from from Return
of the Dream Canteen. We just started playing it just
a few shows ago. We've played it like three times, Eddie,
but we rehearsed those a lot when we were rehearsing
before the tour started, But after five months of being
on tour and not playing those songs, it just felt

(18:58):
too risky to start playing them. We wanted to start
playing them when the album was announced, but it just
and when the first single came out and stuff, but
it just felt like we would have been and taking
too big of a risk for the energy flow. We
just need to be as good as it could be. Yeah,
we want 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 going to take like

(19:21):
a week before we go on tour again. Great makes sense,
Just 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 twenty voices,
and then I've got to do it live in one voice.

(19:42):
You've got to figure out, Okay, what's which one do
I do at this chorus? Which one do I do
at the second choruse you know, you try what kind
of voice do I sing and then 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

(20:04):
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 duplicate the effects. Sometimes it's better live to
just not have any effects. And maybe on the record

(20:25):
I did some modular synth treatment to the guitar that
worked really well for the recording but might not be
necessary for live, Like it might not even be able
to hear it through the nature of a big sound
system outside. Yeah, it's like it's 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

(20:48):
record we're 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 have reverb pedals,
I don't even I think I turned them on like
twice per show or something, and I would and I
did a lot of like slap back because I was

(21:09):
listening to a lot of fifties music when we made
the two records, so good percentage of songs had slap
back delay on the basic track of the guitar. But live,
there's just no point, like, yeah, the arena creates a
slap yeah, and you can't control the speed of it. Yeah,
So I got real used to playing the songs dry,

(21:31):
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 that's how Jimmy Hendricks was
live on the records. There's all kinds of signal processing

(21:51):
to the guitar and stuff and and to the whole
band really and live it's just either distortion or semi
distorted clean sound and the rest you do with your
energy and you're 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

(22:12):
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 left live and
you don't need to use those decorations. Tell me more
about the energy transference with the audience, because it's a
really interesting feeling. Most of us who don't get on

(22:35):
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

(22:58):
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
I was in the band in like eighty nine, we
started really zoning into it, listening to watching videotapes of
ourselves or listening to cassettes, and we realized, wow, okay,

(23:19):
let's yeah, everything's too fast, Like let's 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 what it appears to be live and what it
actually is. Taking into consideration the audience has probably also
got some adrenaline going, so you don't need to try
too much to slow it down. But you've got to

(23:41):
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, 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,

(24:03):
and then i'd come back to my room and be
doing like situps and stuff. And I put a record
it on and it sounded too slow, and 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 that live everything was faster, so it's you're going
faster than your normal perception of time. So that's one difference.

(24:27):
And I think you also play you play harder, and
like I've always played completely differently live than I do
on records, on records like Californication and by the way,
in particular, like I was really playing in this style
that I felt served the songs well and that I
felt like I was doing something with rather than a

(24:48):
blues kind of basic sense of melody or a rock
basic sense of melody. I was listening to synthpop a lot,
and I see that style of melody that sort of
begins with Kraft Work and continued into the eighties 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

(25:09):
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 try to sail out with every note
being in it's perfect place, but creating a sort of
a shape with the notes and not so much putting
a lot of expression into the notes, but trying to

(25:31):
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

(25:51):
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 the studio. We have to pause for a quick break,
and then we'll be back with more from John Fashonte
and Rick Rubin. We're back with more from Rick Rubin

(26:16):
and John f Shante. What is your pre show ritual? Like?
I have all these ways 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

(26:37):
has nothing to do with the sound that comes out
because my playing. I'm I really believe in the philosophy
of you plays 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 have these
warm ups that are really based on Okay, let's forget

(26:59):
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 twelve note system that we all use. That's going
to be challenging for my fingers as well as for
my brain. And so over the years, just because I

(27:21):
do it all the time, I did it a lot
even when I wasn't in the band for the ten
years that I wasn't in it. It's just it's interesting
to me to look at the notes in these various ways.
So I've come up with a whole series of things
that are challenging and that I always learned from having
to do with the organization of notes in relationship to
scales and different kind of scales. And I'm just always

(27:45):
improving on it. No, I'll get little inspirations from it
from like I'll watch, you know, a guitar instruction thing
by John McLoughlin or Allen Holdsworth. I watched one John
McLoughlin thing. I think that got me through like six
years of practicing. And then and then when Allen Holdsworth
thing like went to the next five years, like I see,

(28:05):
I see what they're talking about in there, and then
it makes me think of new ideas 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 add what if I twist it in

(28:27):
this direction or something? You see, if we give you
a guitarget, you give me a demonstration of just how
that works, I could try. Yeah, let's try. I'm curious
to hear it. Okay, So here's an example 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.

(28:51):
But if now I'm going to start accenting it in threes,
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

(29:12):
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, so if we take
the same four notes and instead play them in fives,

(29:35):
like it's so it's four notes, but we go 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 kind of

(29:57):
in a circle, you know. And again if we take
three notes and divide it into sevens, then we go
so yeah, it's hard, yeah, like that it seems exhausting.
Also yeah, so so so that's just that's trying to
show like show it in in one in one position. Yes, um,

(30:20):
so you do that in scales just 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.
And there's a certain interval jump if you're going if
you're playing a seven note scale, and you're going down

(30:42):
in sevens, you're always jumping up at six interval, whether
it's a minor or major six up to six, up
to six. So there's this shape that you see in it.
That's the distance that you're that you're that you're jumping

(31:03):
up every time you go down in sevens on a
seven note scale. That's you know, in this case, a
major based on a major scale. So now I'm gonna
go down in sevens, but I'm gonna I'm gonna accent
in fives. So so it's so difficult, especially with numbers

(31:39):
like fives, where it's not like the even numbers seem
to feel more comfortable. Yeah, if you do in twos
or threes or fives, your picking hand is going is
going down for accent, then up for an accent, then
down for an accent, up for an accent. So that's
another good part of it, is to get your upstrokes
feeling like as solid accents as as your down strokes.

(32:03):
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 distances and the bigger the numbers. Are,
Like I generally when I practice, I'm probably staying in
numbers under ten, both in terms of maybe eleven, but
it's it's hard to go like go down eleven notes

(32:26):
and and accent in thirteens. There's a pattern to it,
but it's much it's it's really hard to do. It
fucks you up. You start hearing the notes as as
dictating the rhythm. And that's what the exercise in general
helps you not do, is to for a moment while
you're practicing, disconnect the rhythm from the pitch. Don't let

(32:49):
the pitch determine 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 them, that the two areas are sort

(33:11):
of functioning independently of each other, yet in harmony that catchy.
It's not. It's not just the order of the notes.
It's an order the order of the notes and where
the accents are yeah, and and and how the rhythm
relates to the note. 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 one hundred

(33:33):
percent like lined up with each other. Yeah, 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 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

(33:56):
on one sense of melody and one's awareness of because
you 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

(34:18):
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, they're 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

(34:40):
you should look at practicing as its own sort of
cool art forms. 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
like the guitar I'm gonna be playing. So I start
out with various exercises and scales, and then I move
on to playing along with things that I like. And

(35:02):
I try to play along with certain things because they're
good for rhythm guitar, certain things because they're good for
band ending and doing vibrato, things that have solos, so
I like playing along with. I have a lot of
things memorized right now that are They're mostly things that
people improvised on a record or live, and so I

(35:23):
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.

(35:46):
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 this 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, 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

(36:08):
like noe noe, noe, noe noe. A lot of the
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 listened to it,
could you tell what you were doing or maybe? And
I can do it with a most any guitar playing,

(36:29):
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 pen and

(36:49):
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

(37:11):
quite make it. And that happens with these guitar players
who go out on a ledge, like Jimmy Page, Jimmy Hendricks.
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

(37:31):
the level of what I'm going to 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 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,

(37:55):
they're so interesting. Yeah, I asked, because some of the
craziest solos 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 had done these trends
scriptions of Frank Zappa's guitar solos. There was a whole
book of them, and I had no interest in reading music.
But when I learned that there was this way of

(38:16):
writing down when people are speeding up and slowing down
across the bar line and when they're going into grooves
that seemed completely separate from what the drummers doing but
do have a relationship, it was fascinating to me. And
it was really the only way to learn a lot
of franksz Appa'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

(38:38):
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 fi because I
think a lot about polyrhythms. I used them a lot
of my electronic music. I have machines I can program
where you're playing like five against four or evenly or

(38:59):
seven against three, or these strange ways of rhythmically relating
to the other instruments. So I'd given a lot of
thought to it for so many years. And I asked them,
as you think of them as objectively accurate? And he
said it was a matter of interpretation. When you're writing
rhythms like that and the drummer is not playing to

(39:19):
a click, but he 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 thirteen evenly across four quarter notes. There's no way
to accurately to be able to objectively say, yes, that

(39:40):
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 type drummer, makes the difference to where
it's not what you conceived it to be. I think
all that studying of Frank Zappa's music that I did

(40:01):
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 that you can be doing
little twists with them all the time and taking all

(40:24):
those liberties that he was taking, like and studying them.
I just I just feel like gave me a sort
of unique outlook for a pop musician on you know,
on what notes are there for and what you're able
to do with them. I feel like, even in the
simplest things that I do, I feel like that familiarity

(40:45):
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,

(41:08):
and it be coherent for the audience, I think. So
you know that that kind of happened at the LA
show that we did a few months ago. I got
out 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. Because we
all used in air monitors, what it actually sounds like

(41:31):
on stage is pretty incoherent. So I went to the
side and was telling my guitar tack, 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 solo. Barely could hear what
I was doing. But after the show, my wife's cousin

(41:51):
said that 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
also do things like that, like just doing this at
every part of the neck that I just doing these
trills like everywhere that I can did Eddie actually invent

(42:14):
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 like nobody was
doing that, but Steve Hackett from Genesis was doing that

(42:35):
using his right hand finger to tap notes, and Frank
Zappa was doing the same thing but using the pick
rather like that's what it sounds like with your finger,
that's with a pick, And so he was calling that
bagpipe guitar and that was a good Both those examples
were good. Three years before Van Hilen influenced Eddie, Like

(42:59):
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 ship.
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,

(43:21):
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. I'll
do the same basic idea, or I'll start with the

(43:43):
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

(44:05):
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 off in another direction, because it's always going
to feel differently depending on the groove of how Fully
and Chat are playing. To play the same solo, it
seems like it would be unnatural when you have a

(44:26):
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 come up with a
like a part that you're going to play a rhythm
a rhythm piece, and you play it for the band
and they join in, and when they join in, it
instigates you to change what your original part was based

(44:48):
on what they're playing. Oh, yeah, completely. And Anthony's always
the last part of that, like, like, I don't really
know exactly what I'm going to do and how it
can be, how the groove is going to be put
into it and all that until I hear what he's thinking.
But there is a certain amount if I bring in
a song, if the drums that Chad aren't playing don't

(45:12):
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. 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

(45:33):
patches of working together because I had an idea of
what I thought should be the low note of the
chord and that kind of thing, and he just hears
a difference and yeah, but you know, 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

(45:55):
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

(46:17):
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 has gone by and he
went to music school and stuff 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 tell
the other one what the intervals that it has in

(46:38):
it are, and when it's what it involves chord changes,
that's really where the trouble, Where it involves more it's
just you got to figure it out. Yeah, you've got
to take some time. But yeah, Usually the songs that
are jam 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,

(47:00):
we're like, we did a jam and the first thing
we played is one song, and what we went into
ten minutes later wound up being a completely other like
we'd 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 when it's moving around

(47:23):
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, would your instinct first to be
thinking about how to interact with it, or would it
be to play along with it, like to double it first,

(47:46):
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 my 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, if 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

(48:07):
to physically play it. I see. So you can't really
duplicate it on the guitar, you do, right, Yeah, not
if it has too many notes in it. He's doing
a lot of chords that have ten notes in him,
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 heads, you know. But for chords to
do what you hear in your head, you have to

(48:28):
have a good idea of that's 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? Would the singing version be faster
than the guitar version to sing the idea or no? Yeah,

(48:49):
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 twenties, I do see things and I

(49:10):
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

(49:32):
instant like I might see two bars of a of
a guitar solo, of the way I'm going to start
the solo. I might see the first two bars in
my head as a single picture, like as a 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

(49:53):
bars look like? I don't know how. I really it's
there for me because 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 twenty,
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 Sold to Squeeze, and
I remember you saying you should write a guitar intro,

(50:13):
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 of that like the school,
like you're scoring an image. Yeah, but it's not an

(50:34):
image that you could necessarily describe it not necessarily, but
it very well could have been. In those days they
were 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,

(50:58):
or it could be color just like a movie, or
you know it was And so as time went by
and I went Californication time I start making music again,
but without that clear visualness, I still have the same
ability to see the feeling of music in my head.
Yet there was no picture to it, but I could

(51:18):
see it. I can only describe it as seeing because
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

(51:40):
things or a visual space like 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 it's something like you've seen what's missing? You don't
have something? What I'm curious you just guys, you're asking

(52:02):
me these questions. You must have something like, 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 don't want to I want to 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 gassed to have a blood test and I

(52:24):
was listening to music and they gassed me and I
could see the music. I could see three D 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. But in

(52:45):
that first time, I was able to clearly see and
it was so cool. It was so cool to be
able to see it. Yeah, that's how it was for me, real, consistently,
from like nineteen ninety two. It's mysterious to me that
that I was able to make music just as colorful
and and emotional and shapely and all these things without it.

(53:12):
And I can only say that even though I don't
see the visuals 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

(53:36):
showing it to you 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 I'm sure there are people who just
go on seeing it their whole lives, but it didn't

(53:58):
work that way for me. But yeah, there are a
lot of ideas, don't you get it safe. 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

(54:21):
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

(54:41):
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
and like mindlessly not thinking, and then something grabs my attention.
Nothing changed, volumes, not any louder, you know. It's like
it's not like the music came on. Music has been

(55:03):
playing for hours, but all of a sudden, like my
attention gets drawn to this thing, right, and it's this
wave of energy, I guess is the way to say
it right and see 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

(55:24):
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 good Fellas comes over me in my head. Before
when I saw things visually, that would have been a
much more extreme like somehow visual concoction that that I

(55:47):
literally see. But in this case, I don't see it,
but I feel it in my brain. Yes, I'm going
to 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 where I get excited.
Oh there it is, yeah, that feeling. Yeah, I'm going

(56:08):
to try to 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 my head. Yeah, for me,
it's not. It's definitely not in my head, right, It's
not a thinking thing for me. It's a whole body
feeling draw interesting. Yeah, yeah, so that's what makes me

(56:30):
think it's still leftover. 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 as if in one moment, I
were feeling the entire listening experience of listening to that record,
the sum of that, where each any aspect of it

(56:52):
contains the whole. Yeah. Yeah. So so that ends up
relating to what we were talking about in terms of
when Fleet plays a bassline, I see in my head,
what would be the counter to that, what would be
the balancer to that? Where the holes in that and
I see a picture of it in my head of

(57:13):
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

(57:34):
in an instant. You know, we're only really taking note
of what's happening consciously all the time. But I think
just as much as dreams are this world that we
don't really understand, I think everything in life is that
there's some sort of subconscious echo that's taking place to
what we're seeing consciously. Absolutely, and I think what we're

(57:56):
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 you know that period of time that I mentioned
in the last show where I had months when I
first got off drugs completely of just being kind of bored.
During that period of time when nothing was happening, I

(58:17):
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
doing anything, not excited about life or anything. But oftentimes

(58:40):
when there's nothing going on, You're 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. Yeah, like oftentimes you're not
going to be able to be in touch with the
subconscious that has its own movement and that has its

(59:03):
own reality. And a lot of the time, it seems
like in that particular case like period that I thought
nothing was happening with me, my life was going nowhere,
it actually had a huge effect on something very productive
that I did, which was making that record. You know,
would you describe it as a premonition, I guess so.

(59:24):
I guess I've had a lot of a lot of
those in my life. Like you can imagine something and
then it ends up coming to pass. Yeah, Like I
see something. Sometimes I see things and 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 realized, Oh my god, I heard
that in my head like ten years ago, Like that

(59:46):
Dice album that you brought over to my house to
day Laughter Died Part two. Yeah, there's moments on that
that I swear I heard in my head when I
was fourteen years old, like seven years before it came out.
I know, I understand that feeling, because sometimes I'll hear
something and they'll be and I know I've never heard before,
or it wasn't even possibly here before. But there's such
a feeling of remembrance when I'm listening to it, or

(01:00:08):
just a sense of yeah, that's how it goes. Do
you know what I mean, like like I already know it, yeah,
A knowing this. 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.
But in some ways that's that's it's useful that it's

(01:00:31):
not the same because we remember something and then we
make it and then we realize that 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 it shows sometimes, Like the Beatles had that thing
with Ringo. They would make fun of him because every
time he tried to write a new song it was
a song that already existed. He thought he was writing

(01:00:53):
a new song, and they would start falling on the
floor laughing because it was it was a Jerry Lee
Lewis song or whatever, and he 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

(01:01:13):
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 learned if I like
a song, I learned 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

(01:01:33):
drawing from that storeroom of all the stuff that of
all the combinations that you've ever heard 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, maybe conscious or unconscious, Yeah,
like this sound, going to this sound feel satisfying. Yeah,

(01:01:57):
And maybe that's because there's a something you heard twenty
five years ago that you liked and lodged, but don't
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. And you know, the different elements,

(01:02:17):
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

(01:02:37):
and matching thing. It's really more you're 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.

(01:02:59):
Our music was generally uplifting. Yeah, 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 it wasn't it wasn't super clear whether
it was yeah, And so I know that that was

(01:03:21):
my thought going into it, aside from the Jimi Hendricks thing,
was just the thought like, let's lighten this up a
little bit, you know, 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.

(01:03:44):
I could have thought of any song, but I thought
this would be a nice little moment to have this
space right before the course, you know. In a lot
of ways, That's why I think learning a lot of
songs is really the only way 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

(01:04:05):
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 giving it and
giving it loads of options to choose from, exactly loads
of options. 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,

(01:04:33):
do you mind if I play a whole verse and
anything you want? I can do it instrumentally if it's
no good that way, but but it seems I'm anything
you want to play. It's fun. I'm gonna try this. Um.
So that Joe Jackson song goes one to f The

(01:05:10):
guy who knows upstairs is a nator. They say, maybe
words the same. He changed his name because someone with

(01:05:33):
the same name made it first. His girlfriend comes to stay.
We hear her screams and think that they rehearse. So

(01:05:54):
maybe a play and maybe someone's really geting you prown

(01:06:14):
every home town every na souse, every fair dealing, every
good job, every swaming, every dream night. Okay, now I'm

(01:06:46):
just gonna play it once, just guitar one, two, three,
four one. Is it that long? Yeah, it's a long,

(01:07:25):
long break. Yeah. It's also interesting the phrasing the bum
bum bum after space sounds like it's answering something. It
doesn't sound like it's saying something. Yeah, that's that's the
way that that chorus generally goes. With his, it's a
long um, it's just a stop and then goes into
the chorus. But with ours, it's uh, it's a sustain right, yeah, yeah,

(01:07:51):
we hold, we hold the chord which came from this
which even that in itself came from another song. There's
this t Rex song called rip Off that goes like
it's funny. It's called It's funny, it's called I Really
at the time that was a joke in my mind,
like it would be cool if I ripped off rip off.
But yeah, like it has this cycle in the verse

(01:08:12):
that goes like uh hm, so, so I always thought

(01:08:33):
that was cool that the verse had this break in
it where the guitar just played this major seven chord.
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

(01:08:58):
went and then the Joe Jason Yeah, but instead of
doing that, I went it sounds more to me that

(01:09:21):
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 that that's

(01:09:45):
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 exactly like like gradually, and which gave it
the effect of somehow feeling triumphant rather than feeling like
you or a release, some kind of a release, yeah,

(01:10:06):
rather than feeling some kind of rather than it feeling
like a down or it made the whole thing made
it made the chorus felt like an uplifting thing. We
had another song earlier on the first album that I
did with them, knock Me Down, where that it was like,
as I might not be in the right key, so

(01:10:37):
we had. We had this thing that went major chord
to minor chord, and it's just one of those things
that I've not There's a lot there's certain songs in
history where somebody does that where I just noticed that
that that it's a good feeling, and uh, that's another
thing I can't because I know how to play so
many songs. I have things categorized in my head to
where there's all these sort of chord progressions. There's a

(01:11:00):
lot of songs that have similar chord progressions, and so
I have them sort of 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 they're categorized
in my head is being oh, that's that type of chord.
It's rare that in a rock song from history, I
would hear a chord progression that I would go, oh,
that that doesn't fall into any category, you know, but

(01:11:21):
there are some, especially in progressive rocks and stuff. So yeah,
like under the Bridge was just another attempt at doing
the major to minor chord but taking time with it.
And I think Beatles did that too, know, the major
to the minor. I'm sure they Yeah, they definitely did. Like,
like let's see, I was playing along in one the

(01:11:41):
other A lot of the time it's like they already
went to a F chord, say Laren 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

(01:12:03):
time they go to it, it's a it's a minor
chord and it changes. Yeah. We'll be right back with
the rest of John F. Shaunte and Rick Rubin's conversation.
After a quick break, we're back with Rick Rubin and
John F. SHAWNTA. Can you think of any songs that

(01:12:24):
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 if it's separate, it's completely separate. I'm not
trying to connect the two things. I do know that

(01:12:46):
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 upstrokes and accent those rather than accenting
the down strokes, 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

(01:13:09):
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,

(01:13:33):
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, no, time. Yeah. I think of it
as you're placing yourself in a few points in time

(01:13:55):
at the same time. Like I think if you can
do all three of those things at once, be in
the past, being 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 preconcept and about
what you're about to do. Yes, to be in the moment,
listening to what everybody else is doing right right in

(01:14:15):
the moment at every point, and also listening to what's
just happened. Yeah, I think it's 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,

(01:14:38):
like and you can't get out. Yeah it's bad. That's
what it's like. When I'm having a bad show. I'm
just listening to what's already happened. I don't have any
idea of what I'm about to do, not in the moment.
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?

(01:15:00):
Bad show like for you, a bad show like that
I feel like that doesn't I've never seen that, but
how you probably have seen me. Really. 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 you just kept telling me, like I kept telling
you what I was experiencing, that everything's sounding bad to me,

(01:15:23):
and you were like, you're playing great, sounds great, you know,
but but like so, it's just the it's your interpretation
of what's happening. It's what's happening inside. It's 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 lives
than I'd had on any of our records before, and

(01:15:45):
the energy of the live playing. And I think I'd
put too much pressure on myself to where most of
the records float out really nicely. But the first week
or two I was experiencing a really negative thing where
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

(01:16:07):
in the moment. And what do you think shifted it?
Because he said it was for the first few weeks
the meditation thing I did, Yeah, 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

(01:16:29):
where where you're feeling a similar kind of unease, 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. On the opposite side is the palm
of my hand, yeah, and back of the left wrist. Yeah.
It might have been both risk but it was very subtle.

(01:16:52):
I would have never even noticed that there was a
feeling there, But when I tried to separate myself from
the feeling in 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 said, there's a third point. You know. I can't
remember what it was, but I want to what maybe
it was the road or something, whatever it was, And
eventually a whole explosion of thoughts came out about a

(01:17:15):
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 was lodged in your body, Yeah, and so I'd

(01:17:35):
some the thing up in that way. All of a sudden,
all these memories came back of this friendship that went
bad 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 going
to 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,

(01:17:57):
which isn't possible. Like I've heard the people talk shit
about the greatest guitar players ever, whether it's Jimmy Hendricks,
Jimmy Page, Alan Holdsworth, that Evan Helen, 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 every Also, if you have that, if you're
doing something new or going out on a limb, if

(01:18:19):
you're really going forward, there are always people who resist. Yes, yeah,
they have no context for it. Yeah. 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

(01:18:39):
I had this idea that I was going to play
in a way that was going to 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 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

(01:19:04):
in a more flashy wave was going to have to
just come naturally, 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 reaction that you want from people,
separate from the feeling. It's just it never works. Yeah,
it doesn't work. And so so that's where I had
some intelligent part of me telling myself, you know this,

(01:19:26):
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

(01:19:48):
or anything, and just doing what came naturally. Cool. Yeah,
I'm trying to say 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,

(01:20:09):
I'm 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,
no mind coming out, not at all. Okay, great, because
I feel like there's so much. Again, it's you know,
I never know in the beginning, but once you start talking,
it's like there's a lot to talk about. It's funny
that we don't when we're working on stuff, there's not

(01:20:31):
much talk of you know, we don't philosophy as 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. Again, always a pleasure
talking to you. I always learned something's fun. Yeah, it's
a lot of fun talking to you. Cool. So we

(01:20:53):
do this again soon. Okay cool. Thanks to John F.
Shante for stopping by. Shang a lot to chat with you.
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 my playlist at broke Record
podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube
channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast. We

(01:21:16):
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(01:21:36):
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(01:21:57):
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