MusicRadar interview 2008/2009
Joe Bosso: Did you record the record at home?
John Frusciante: Aha.
Joe Bosso: It’s a ??? it has a very intimate feel of course, but there’s this huge live drum set on that one would get from like a big time studio album?
John Frusciante: Well, it’s big time studio, you know, I mean it’s not, you know… I think it’s a miss that you need like a fifteen foot ceiling to get a good drum sound, our drum room is pretty small and oddly shaped and it’s got a really live sound and we’ve got amazing drum sound just from the dining room, I don’t think studios are all that, I think it was a really poor misconception that I had for a long time that for something to be a real record you had to do it in a recording studio, ‘cause anybody at home, just by collecting gear piece by piece, you can make things as good sounding as what they do in the studio and especially if you… if you’re doing all the engineering yourself as a musician, the more, the more you play a part in, whatever, the mixing, the ‘micing’, the twiddling of the knobs and stuff, it’s your opportunity to put more and more of your own expression of the music, you know, another words if you play a guitar solo if you’re also pushing the phasers and EQing it and putting different kinds of reverbs on it at different points, it can be an extension of the same feeling that you play it with, whereas when somebody else is doing it in these ??? big studios with highly paid engineers, they don’t know what you’re trying to express, they’re not on the inside of the music, they’re on the outside of it and… so to me the final thing ends up ??? in cases like that. Yeah, I think you can get a good sound anywhere for drums, you know, like MOTOWN where they record all that shit in a tiny little room, you know, it’s… it just doesn’t matter…
Joe Bosso: Well I was particularly impressed by what you do with your voice of some of the tracks, it reminded me of John Lennon who was constantly changing the sound of his voice.
John Frusciante: Yeah, yeah… I’m uh… ooh… you… with anything like, I need to hear, with… with music… the music that I like the way it sounds is where there’s constant sonic variation going on where all the sounds are… where there’s movement going on, I think… even just in the nature of playing a series of notes on a guitar or a series of chords it’s, it’s the change that affects us, it’s that sense of regularity and at the same time a change and variation, that… that magical quality in music that just makes it constantly mean new things to us and as a song goes onwards the emotional response is constantly going in unexpected places and… so I, I feel like the sound with all this, you know, technology that’s come about in the last, you know, 100 years of being able to record stuff, that’s the thing I like to take advantage of just to be able to go from one atmosphere to another atmosphere and to go from one type of vocal sound to another and to make it seem far away, to make it seem close, to make it seem small, to make it seem big, and to create ??? effects, you know flipping the tape backwards and doing weird things with reverbs and delays and stuff, I like to hear music changing all the time, you know, so it’s, it’s like, when I hear records that are just mixed in a straight-ahead way where everything is just balanced with each other, nothing’s too soft, nothing’s too loud, this is boring to me, it’s not what I want to hear, when we were mixing this record my main thing was just to have something that I could blast on the stereo system late at night and, you know, and trip out to, you know, just have something where you’re just like “Whoa, how did that happen, how’s that possible?!â€, you know just like, I don’t at all record to like impress people or to try to do something good or something, it’s more just like I wanna make something that I like, that I would wanna hear, you know, and in rock music my favorite mixed records are always these ones that like… you know, that, where the artist had some say whether, you know someone like John Lennon, who was real ??? about having different vocal sounds in The Beatles or whatever, or Jimi Hendrix, you know, on electric ladyland or George Clinton on the first few Funkadelic records, I like it when they just take their same musical sense that makes them sing or play in a way that they do and they apply it to the mixing console, you know, so that… that was totally my approach for this is just to trip it out as much as possible.
