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May/June 2001, Canadian Musician (Canada)
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My alarm went off, but didn't wake me. I was already up and had been for most of the night. It's not every day that you get to meet your idol. As the car pulled up to Toronto's Four Seasons, I began to have an ever-clearing picture of what it looks like to see a grown man shit his pants.

How many years had I been inspired and moulded by this guy's playing? How many times had I day dreamed about meeting him? And how many times had I fantasized about all the things I would ask him if I ever got the chance? None of that mattered now. I was already on the elevator headed up to his room with three pages of trite, over thought questions that were not really of any interest to me that seemed like the intelligent type of questions you would ask if you were a reporter. But I'm not a reporter; I'm a guitarist and a song-writer who is about to meet his biggest influence. There was no way I was going to ruin any of this by looking down at notes and talking about the same old shit that I hated being asked myself. As the door opened, we met face to face and my questions soared out the window as we talked about what has influenced the famed Red Hot Chili Pepper guitarist, John Frusciante, of late. Including his two hours of yoga earlier in the day, the big-breasted women of the Russ Meyer movie he watched earlier, and how Andy Warhol's movies influence his music. But let's cut to the chase: John's guitar playing.

James Black: How do you write music? How do you form ideas?
John Frusciante: When I play the guitar or when I write music, I don't do anything unless it's an idea in my head first. I don't let my hands just do whatever they want to do. I don't play things as far as just not think about it, just do whatever my subconscious lets happen, happen. I have to have it perfectly formed as an idea in my head to feel that it's worthwhile I'll sit there and do nothing. If I'm at rehearsal with my band I'll just listen to them play. If I don't feel any music inside me, I just won't play until I really hear something in my head that's worth playing. Or I'll play one note every bar or whatever. I don't do something unless It's an idea. To me when you hear things in which the idea is solid before the execution of it the feeling is much more pronounced and much more definite.

JB: That brings to mind the solo in `I Could Have Lied' I wanted to ask you about it because it has always been a favourite and it has that feeling to roe that beyond the notes that you're playing there's some other magical emotion attached to it. When you're doing solos do you have it ali mapped out first and then it's just a matter of execution?
JF: That solo that I played on the record is pretty much the exact solo that I played the day Anthony [Kiedis, the Peppers' vocalist] and I wrote the song when we recorded it on my 4-track. It was a real heavy day. He was really feeling bad about this girl who didn't like him who he really liked, and we drove around talking about it all day. It was raining, really rainy He wanted to write a song about it and I came up with this music and he went to his house and came up with the lyrics we put our two things together and we recorded it, then I just did the solo. It was improvised, but every note that I played I was still imagining it before I played it. Which isn't always how I played back then, sometimes back then I would do what I was just talking about. Just let my hands go wherever they went and separate myself from it, which I learned a lot from But that solo I remember I was very much trying to have every note be in its perfect place. When you've got feelings to work off of, like the fact that it's raining, or the fact that your friend is feeling bad, the ideas that appear in your head before you execute them have more weight The ideas that come naturally to you at those points are going to be the thicker kind of feelings.

JB: I would say that no matter what environment I listen to that song in I would get that vibe, of a rainy day. With your new album [To Record Only Water For Ten Days], which I love by the way, are there those kinds of memories attached to every song, a certain weight to every single note?
JF: Thanks. A lot of the feelings and a lot of the images in the words are rooted in a period of time where I would have a lot of visions. It would be like I was dreaming but I was awake, but I would see a film in my head. I've always had all of these voices in my head since I was a little kid. They always kept me interested in life and always said interesting things to me but we didn't really start working really well as a team in any way until I was 21, but it was short lived. Then went another few years of absorption, where I wasn't really producing that much with my lite but they were telling me a lot of things and they were teaching me all kinds of things For the last three years, we've been working in conjunction with each other again I feel like it was those years of absorbing all the things that they had to teach me, has gone into every one of these songs, and everything to come.

JB: Do you write lyrics from beginning to end or are they just pieced together from different writings you've had?
JF: When I write a song I finish the whole thing When the idea comes to me I write all the lyrics in one sitting, sometimes it takes two or three hours, or maybe longer, or maybe shorter. But I don't stop until the song is finished until all the lyrics are written I'm very disciplined just about the craft of writing songs and if I can't think of words for a song then I just figure it's not meant to be a song if no words come to me but usually they do.

JB: Your earlier solo stuff was very bare bones, mostly just a guitar and a voice. Did you use keyboards and drum loops on this new album as a result of having too much to say, so much that just the guitar wouldn't do?
JF: Well that was just the sound that I heard in my head. A few years ago, about four years ago, I'd pretty, much been painting for five years but I was really starting to think about music and really thinking about the possibility of making a third record. I felt that I had written some really good songs in my life but I knew that the versions of the songs that I'd released weren't the ultimate versions of those songs I felt like the versions that I'd released were beautiful and they were perfectly representative of a feeling and a time but they didn't have any drams and they didn't have any bass. They weren't fully orchestrated songs. I just felt like the feelings of thee songs I used to write what would be the way to make them full because it never sounded right when I played them with a bassist or a drummer.

JB: Why was that, just not on the same page?
JF: Maybe I was just playing with the wrong people but it never sounded right to me. I didn't really know about the vocabulary of electronic music because I didn't really listen to much electronic music. I think the only completely electronic music I was listening to in 1991 was the Residents They do have some completely electronic things but even they're not completely electronic.

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