The Watt from Pedro show, 25th January 2009
John Frusciante: Yeah, it’s always going to be twice as big but there’s..
.
Mike Watt: It keeps going
John Frusciante: But there’s no twice as big…
Music playing loudly
Mike Watt: See I don’t know how to work these leashes. So what I do is, I just hang up on the dude.
All laughing
Mike Watt: There must be away to silence him without…crashing against the wall. But Empyrean, a high point, and like you were saying about the inner light…
John Frusciante: Yeah, it’s about reaching for stuff that’s sort of beyond your grasp, but that you keep charging towards…
Mike Watt: Proof?
John Frusciante: Yeah, yeah. some kind of something inside yourself, or something, whatever it is that drives your imagination to keep striving to sort of become one with that energy more and more so, and all your actions in your life, or…or um..yeah, you know, or like people in science or religion where your constantly sort of reaching for things that can’t completely be understood or attained, but it doesn’t stop whatever that force is inside you that drives you to want to know more and learn more and do more, you know.
Mike Watt: Yeah.
John Frusciante: It’s about some of…the record’s about some of the struggles that you go through inside as a creative person just trying to uh, trying to become one with something that you don’t really understand that doesn’t really have any concrete form that you can grasp onto but that you’re born with this incentive to, to do something, whether it’s playing music or painting, whatever it is, you know.
Mike Watt: Yeah. You paint, too?
John Frusciante: I used to, yeah.
Mike Watt: No more?
John Frusciante: Not anymore.
Mike Watt: Oh wow.
John Frusciante: Yeah, about 10 years ago I decided to limit myself to the things that I felt I had the most aptitude for, because I’d spent about 5 years concentrating on things that I didn’t have a lot of aptitude for. It was a good learning experience and it was something good to keep me connected to the artistic force for other reasons besides, that I was making a living at it or something, you know. I kind of stopped doing it in the situations where I had any value to the public and started just following my creativity. I think it was a good period of time for me. But when I sort of came back into the world as it were, I just really wanted to, uh, focus on writing songs and playing guitar…
Mike Watt: Music.
John Frusciante:..and learning about, you know, electronic music from time to time, and stuff.
Mike Watt: I got an interview with John Coltrane. He says all musicians are after some kind of truth.
John Frusciante: Yeah, you’re at..you’re trying…I feel like we’re all expressing things that really can’t be expressed any other way. We’re expressing truth when something sounds good to our ear, when something connects to our soul. I feel like it’s saying something to us, but it’s not something that we can put into words, and I think, uh, in some point, in some ways they can probably be reduced to some kind of mathematical formulas, but no musician’s conscious of that, you just sort of decide, ‘I’m gonna play this note, this hard, at this particular, exact point in time.’ You know, it’s all reducible to numbers, but we’re driven…like the organization of it…if something’s too many numbers off it’s gonna be off time…
Mike Watt: Yeah.
John Frusciante: …and if it’s within a certain margin then its, then we hear it as on time. If it’s a little late, depending on where you are in the song, it’s gonna be a good groove. It can be, it can, um, it can be analyzed that way, but, we do it purely on intuition and feeling and emotion and the set up of our muscles, and stuff. And we don’t really know what we’re saying, but we know when it means something, and it’s just an odd set up, you know.
Mike Watt: And interactions, too, between people.
John Frusciante: Yeah.
Mike Watt: Cuz then you got more.
John Frusciante: A lot of times the music expresses the…
Mike Watt: You call them solo albums, but you collaborate.
John Frusciante: Oh yeah, it’s very…it’s just cuz I write the songs…
Mike Watt: Right, right.
