The Watt from Pedro show, 25th January 2009
Josh Klinghoffer: Just on guitar.
John Frusciante: Yeah, just guitar, and singing onto a mini-disk
Brother Matt: Just like a sketch outline
John Frusciante: Yeah, I mean, I usually have the basic arrangement real clear in my head, so I’ll just record, like, the whole album just as just guitar and singing into my mini-disk, and then I’ll give Josh a CD of it and then he just drives around in his car, like, listening to eat and making up drum parts in his head and stuff, and then we get together, you know, a few times, and refine, you know, the drum parts, but like, he pretty much has it all mapped out in his head. We think of music real similarly so it doesn’t seem like I ever really play with, like, I dunno, it seems like with him playing drums and Flea playing bass it was just like, not really…
Mike Watt: Yeah, you ain’t got to teach anybody
John Frusciante: Yeah, yeah, they know where I’m coming from, you know, so we just, uh, you know, maybe an accent here or there, but basically, I like to be surprised by what they come up with and stuff. So, yeah, so we just do that, and we just record ‘em from there. We once made demos, and we didn’t really like that. Like, we ended up kinda in the studio just trying to copy the demo
Josh Klinghoffer: And we still often liked the demo a lot
John Frusciante: Yeah, we liked the demo more. So it’s better to enjoy that process of creativity in the studio, rather than thinking of it as, like, you’re trying to copy something which is just like measuring something or something. It’s not fun. With this album there’s a lot of experimentation and fun.
Josh Klinghoffer: The main basic guitar, drums, bass were done in 3 days, I think.
John Frusciante: Yeah, yeah, the basic tracks were done super quick. Laughs.
Josh Klinghoffer: 3 or 4
John Frusciante: And any other songs we added after that, like the first song was done in, like, 2 days, yeah.
Mike Watt: Experimentation? I wanna hear it. Can we hear some?
John Frusciante: Yeah.
Dark/Light is played
Mike Watt: Ok, Watt From Pedro Show. We just heard something off John Frusciante’s new solo record, The Empyrean. A tune called Dark/Light. You wanna tell us something about that?
John Frusciante: Yeah, it was, it used to just be the first half of the song, and then uh, and then just at a certain point pretty late in the record we decided to have the song carry on and have a completely different feel for the second half. The first half’s sort of lyrically and musically is sort of symbolic of inner darkness and the second half is symbolic of inner light.
Mike Watt: Ah, hence the title, Dark/Light.
John Frusciante: And it sounds that way too, like, the first half has kind of a dark sound to it.
Mike Watt: Yeah.
John Frusciante: and the second half is really bright sounding. And yeah, um, yeah, the second half is one of the few things I play all the instruments on the record, where I play bass and I play drum machine and stuff. But, like, usually it’s Flea playing bass and Josh playing drums.
Mike Watt: Right, right.
John Frusciante: Um, yeah, experimenting a lot with tripped out (inaudible)
Mike Watt: The tune’s done and then like, “I want to add more to it.â€
John Frusciante: Uh, yeah, the first half was the whole song and then just one day it popped into my head a way to, to continue it on, you know. Yeah.
