Red Hot Chili Peppers – I’m With You: Flea interview

Unfortunately, Flea has not been returning my calls or emails. However, the fine people at Stereogum managed to interview that funky bassist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In the interview, Flea discusses the new album, I’m With You, and what John Frusciante means to him. Highlights include:

“The number one difference (for recording the new record) is John Frusciante left the band, and he was a huge part of our creative process for a long time. I’m so grateful for him. He wrote the principal parts for many of our most popular songs, and the parts for many of our most artistically profound songs, which weren’t necessarily popular. He just gave us so much as a songwriter, as a player, as a human being, and just his relationship to music, which is such a beautiful and pure and powerful one, but we took two years off from the band during that time he left, and I didn’t think I’d want to continue the band without him. But once he left, I realized that dealing with this different situation, it seemed like it would be, I just felt so much love for the band, and love for Anthony, I just wanted to keep doing it…”

“Another difference is, during the time off, I went to school. I went to USC for a year and studied music theory, and got into playing the piano because of that — because I needed the piano to do my homework — and so I started playing piano and writing songs on the piano, so it’s just a much different place. Having never played a chordal instrument before, I just always played the bass and trumpet, I started writing songs on piano. A lot of the songs on the record were written on piano. And Josh also writes on the piano, so all this music was coming from the piano and that’s just never happened before.”

You heard it here first (well, second) – a piano album from the RHCP! Also, Flea loves Thom Yorke also as much as I do:

“I don’t specifically know the Radiohead process, but in my situation working with Thom, it was interesting because the majority of what we did was perform from his solo record The Eraser, and it was taking music that was mostly electronic and translating it to a live band situation, you know? And it was really fun because of the electronic rhythms that he did, the rhythms don’t have normal human rhythms that we’re used to — at least western culture human rhythms — and so it was really fun to have to make my body move in a different way than it normally would, to make it happen. Thom is just a fucking phenomenal musician, just a brilliant transcendent, musician, just without thought he just fucking shreds, and he’s incredible. It’s just great, it’s so inspiring for me to play with musicians who just shine so hard you know?”