Q & A: John Frusciante
From Mother’s Milk to soy milk.
John Frusciante is the only one of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ seven guitarists to join the band twice. The 30-year-old hippie-punk-funky-monk left for five years to withdraw into himself, heroin and painting. He returned sober, spiritual and centered. “I’m somebody who’s taken that chance of throwing a lot of earthly things away to get to a point where I can show people a world they can only see through music and paintings.”
His third solo disc, To Record Only Water For Ten Days is a collection of rainy-day pop songs orchestrated with synths and strum-and-pluck guitar.
There’s an extremely hermetic feeling to your record, with titles like “Going Inside” and “Invisible Movement”. Where are you now?
I dedicated years to getting inside this energy, but couldn’t do anything with it because there were certain blocks in my brain and I had given up playing music. Now I’ve gotten my skills as a songwriter and musician to where spirits give me energies, feelings, colors and shapes and I can turn them into songs.
Could you describe the spirits?
I think when you love somebody, you’re seeing something in their eyes your conscious brain isn’t trained to understand. Say, for instance, you love certain movie stars like I love Humphrey Bogart, Joe Dalessandro and Andrea Feldman… If I love those people, that means they have spirits inside them who are friends with me. These spirits connect all of us because they could be in one person one second and another person the next – they go around helping people out and we help them by being creative.
Why did you leave the Chili Peppers?
I had a strong belief in these dimensions, but I didn’t understand how I could properly translate that into a way of living – I felt very close to dying. Through the years I spent learning about the painters I love, as well as tripping out and communicating with spirits in different ways… I’ve come out where I say when I joined the band this last time how I could use this belief on earth.
This record is lusher, more cohesive and accessible than your previous solo efforts. What would you attribute that to?
When I was 21, I would sometimes have a few words, improvise [music] and just record that. But that’s not enough anymore. If a song comes to me, I want to see it through and make it live the best life it can. And in the last couple of years, the main thing that has made me happy is Depeche Mode, New Order and Orchestral Maneuvers In The Dark. I realized before I knew how to use a synthesizer or how to program drums that that was going to be the way I could take my songs and turn them into fully orchestrated pieces.
How have you changed your health habits?
I do a pretty intense type of yoga, I quit smoking and caffeine, and I take lots of herbs and eat health foods only.
Any regrets?
Definitely not – I can see other ways it could have gone, but a man who is as happy as me cannot possibly have regrets.
— Lorne Behrman
