Why is the Red Hot Chili Peppers Album Called I’m With You?

Ah, the age old question – how does an album name come about? Is it the name of a song on the album, is it the name of something cool you saw on deadline day, or is some kind of sexual inneundo? In the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ case, it is D) none of the above (well, it could be the last one maybe). MTV has the low down on the reasoning behind the name of the Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m With You.

“We thought of calling it a song title off the record, and when I mentioned that to [producer] Rick [Rubin], he said, ‘That just makes it seem like we don’t have enough ideas,’ ” RHCP frontman Anthony Kiedis said. “And I didn’t even stop to think of the fact that every one of our records is like that, and I don’t think ‘shortage of ideas’ was ever our primary dilemma, considering the mountain range of scraps we left behind. So, as an experiment, I started making lists of titles, and all of them, in retrospect, were quite lame, and none of them really captured the spirit of this record, which we had all very much fallen in love with.

“And then Josh showed up one day, maybe a day before there was some sort of deadline for a title, and he wrote [‘I’m With You’] on a piece of paper,” he continued, “And very subtly scooched it [in front of me], and I was like, ‘What’s that?’ And we all kind of put our eyes on it at the same time and went: ‘That is the title of our record.’ ”

“It’s open, and there’s not really a negative connotation. It’s inviting. The first time I heard a non-one-of-us mention it, it gave me the best feeling you could imagine,” Kiedis said. “Unbeknownst to me, the news [of the album’s title] had hit the radio, and some kid came up to me and he shook my hand and he said, ‘I’m with you!’ And I was like, ‘Why are you saying that? Where did you hear that?’ He said, ‘I’m with you!’ And then I realized that he must’ve heard it on the radio or something, and it was just a great feeling.”