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Chili Peppers Guitarist Preparing Third Solo LP

John Frusciante’s To Record Only Water for Ten Days due in February.

Guitarist John Frusciante will use the downtime before the Red Hot Chili Peppers begin work on their next album to promote his third solo LP, To Record Only Water for Ten Days.

On the album, due February 13 on Warner Bros., Frusciante handles all the vocals and music, drawing inspiration from ’80s synth pop and several rock pioneers.

“I programmed the drums myself and played synthesizers and guitar and sing,” he said Thursday at the My VH1 Music Awards. “It’s partly inspired by the songwriters who I love, like Lou Reed and David Bowie and Syd Barrett, but instrumentation-wise, since I wanted to do it all myself, it’s kind of inspired by Depeche Mode and New Order.”

The guitarist, who recorded the LP in his home studio, will mount a short promotional tour of Europe in late January and may play one-off shows in New York and Los Angeles. Frusciante released Niandra Lades … And Usually Just a T-shirt in 1994 and Smile From the Streets You Hold in 1997. His solo work has been radically different from the melodic punk funk of the Chili Peppers. Both of his albums have consisted of scratchy, lo-fi pop songs with caterwauling vocals laid over atmospheric acoustic and electric guitars and manipulated tape loops. Frusciante wrote his own biography for the new album, which reads: “Between 1992 and 1997, John Frusciante had many periods where his main social activity was with spirits manifested as voices, thought waves, astral bodies and decay of physical matter. The things they taught him (often in non-Earth language, but often in English) are contained in this record’s words. The feelings of this music is the feeling of the spirits John Frusciante is friends with.”

Before his European solo jaunt, the guitarist will play a few shows in South America with the Chili Peppers. The band will begin work on the follow-up to the multiplatinum Californication (1999) in February. “I’m just starting to get vague colors in my head right now,” Frusciante said of the new material.

Bassist Flea said the group is finally ready to put Californication to bed after releasing four U.S. singles from the LP and spending a year and a half on the road promoting it. “We already feel like we did too much,” Flea told VH1 Radio. “We could probably do more and milk it, but it’s better to have time to breathe and write something new. We’re just really grateful for everything that’s come our way, and we think for us to stay in the spirit of giving people fresh and inspired music that we should write some more.” The Los Angeles band plans to release the album about this time next year, drummer Chad Smith said.

-Teri vanHorn

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