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Guitar World: Were all of the songs on the new record written in the last three years?

John Frusciante: All of the songs were written between November 1999 and April 2000. I hadn't written anything for five years before that, but I had spirits guiding me and helping me through hard times. At a certain point, when I started my life over again, I felt it was very important for me to work really hard on the lyrics. Music is once again the most important thing in my life. I practice now with the same ferocity that I did when I was a teenager, but my approach is much more efficient , and my view overall is much broader. One of the strongest forces of positivity in the world is music the purpose of a rock musician's job is to make people feel good; it's a purpose very much like that of a doctor or psychologist. Music can straighten out people's lives in profound ways, because music helps us to make sense out of life, either through our interpretation of the lrics or our response to the music itself.

Guitar World: The intro of To Record Only Water's opener, "Going inside" features a very bizarre-sounding, super-distorted guitar melody.

John Frusciante: That's not guitar; that's my voice. [laughs] I was singing through a compressor with the volumes all the way up, and I had the fader on the tape machine all the way up too, completely overdriving the channel. I did a similar thing on track 12 of Usually Just A T-shirt: I sang through a guitar amp, with loads of reverb, and I recorded it backward. When Flea heard it, he said, How did you get that crazy guitar sound?

Guitar World: During the second half of the "Going inside" intro, the vocal sounds like a slide guitar.

John Frusciante: That was done by adding silence: after the vocal part was recorded, I erased portions of the sound quickly pushing and releasing the record button. I was rather impressed with myself that it worked out so well!

Guitar World: That technique is in line with a painterly approach because, in painting, you can subtract by adding meaning that you eliminate parts of an image by painting blank space. By using the record button, you add silence, or blank space, to existing music.

John Frusciante: Subtracting by adding is a great way to put it. I always approach music with painter's terms. I like to read Leonardo DaVinci's notebooks, and his advice to painters serves as my main guide as a creative musician; I'm always trying to apply those things to the guitar.

Guitar World: Can you give a example?

John Frusciante: In painting, Da Vinci was trying to master nature, in terms of recreating the world around him. In music, I feel we're reflecting places and shapes from the fourth dimension, where substantial, solid feelings exist in a nonphysical world. When a feeling or a thought inspires me, and I want to turn that into a musical idea, I have to take it out of a timeless dimension and bring it into a dimension based on time. DaVinci goes into great detail about things such as how an old person should be drawn compared to how a young person should be drawn, and I've made a correlation to playing the guitar. Specifically, when I practiced as a kid, I'd go through scales, or play what I considered to be the hardest things to play. Also, if I played a reggae song, I'd hit the guitar the same way as if I was playing a heavy metal song. But when you play reggae, the way you should pick or strum the strings is entirely different from playing fast metal solos. The same is true when you play a Ramones song [plays a series of power chords, using all down-strokes, at breakneck speed]. It takes a lot of muscle to be able to do that without tightening up. With the guitar, there are an infinite number of ways to hit it and to pull sounds out of it. It all comes down to the kinds of colors and shapes you want to put into the air.

---Andy Aledort

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