Red Hot Soloing
AS IT TURNS out, Frusciante’s almost insatiable thirst for new musical knowledge doesn’t stop there either. Carrying on from his interest in British electronic music of a certain heavily-rouged vintage – he famously listened to The Human League’s Travelogue and Reproduction albums every day when driving to the studios during the By The Way sessions – the influence of sequenced music on the guitarist’s playing continued when recording Shadows Collide With People.
“Yeah, it’s weird,” Frusciante notes, “but for the last year or so, a lot of music that I’ve been the most inspired by is stuff that there’s no way to learn on guitar. I like this very abstract sort of electronic music by a guy named Pita Rehberg and another guy called Ekkehard Ehlers. These people play computer and the sounds they make, they’re not melodic and they’re also not rhythmic. There’s really no way of interpreting them on the guitar, but in a way that makes it soothing for me because any other kind of music, I automatically can take it apart in my head in relation to the guitar. Whereas with that music I have no way of interpreting it like that, so I only hear it as music, the same way I heard guitar-playing when I was six years old or whatever.”
Perhaps the most direct link to Frusciante’s playing on this latest solo record can be traced back through a lineage of British guitarists. He admits that, in musical terms, he is something of an Anglophile.
“Yeah, it seems like most of the stuff that i get really excited about these days is English usually. I guess on Shadows Collide With People, the guitar-playing that I was excited about was the same stuff that i was excited about for By The Way. That was John McGeogh’s playing in Magazine and Siouxsie & The Banshees, Johnny Marr’s playing in The Smiths, Bernard Sumner’s playing in Joy Division and New Order and George Harrison’s guitar-playing in The Beatles. That’s the guitar-playing that influenced the way I play on the record.”
As far as his electric guitar parts on the album are concerned, Frusciante says his setup remained pretty much the same as it had been for By The Way – playing his Telecaster or SG through his Marshall Major 200W with various speaker combinations. To further ease its progress, Shadows Collide With People was recorded at Cello Studios in LA, scene of the sessions for the last two Chili Peppers albums. The only major difference in the control room was the absence of producer Rick Rubin, since Frusciante was directing the recording process himself this time.
“It was all a big learning experience for me, this record,” he admits. “I’d never been the one responsible for paying attention to how much things cost and having everything in control, to be able to be the one who’s checking what kind of compressor they’re using or what kind of microphone they were using.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the love/hate relationship that Frusciante seems to enjoy with Rubin, his approach to mixing was markedly different to that of the Chili Peppers’ producer. “Yeah, the main things that I featured are all the little incidental sounds that appear throughout it. Rick is more about basing a mix around the vocal, bringing the vocal up really loud. For me, I like the idea of when this interesting sound comes along, you base the mix around that, and then the next interesting sound comes along and you base the mix around that. I base the mix around the overdubs. So that’s definitely a big difference between us, but y’know, I like the vocal approach too.”
