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Did you work with any kind of click track?
No. I have a very good sense of time, and it's not a problem for me to avoid speeding up or slowing down. When I do it's usually because I mean to. Even in the Chili Peppers, we use click tracks as little as possible. Sometimes [producer] Rick [Rubin] suggests it, and we'll do it just to feel what it would be like to play exactly in time. But we never like the way it sounds when someting's recorded with a click, and usually switch it off when we go for a take.
I'm not saying my tempo didn't fluctuate when I was recording Curtains. When the bass player and drummer did their overdubs, they had to memorize the spots where the tempo sped up or slowed down. But to me, that sounded goos. That's the part of the music where the human being really exists. I don't like recordings that are perfect.

Did you sing and play guitar simultaneously when you recorded the songs?
I did on all but two of them: "Hope" and "Time Tonight," where I recorded the acoustic guitar first and then overdubbed the lead vocals. The guitar parts in those songs are a little more intricate, my timing was much more in the pocket.

Did you play your Martin acoustics on the album?
Yeah. On "Ascension" I also played a 1940's Martin 12-string. I really love David Bowie's Hunky Dory album, and there's a few songs on there that have a 12-string in one speaker and a six-string in the other that basically play the same thing.

A lot of the songs are in keys like G sharp and C sharp. Did you detune the guitars or use a capo ? Or did you just play barre chords in standard tuning?
I'm never in any alternate tuning; it's always standard. I'm a fan of capos, but I didn't use one on this album. To me, every key has a different feeling to it. I try to not to play in "normal" keys because I feel there might be some interesting ideas waiting to happen in keys others often avoid. We might be at that point in time to see what kinds of feelings are in the sharp keys.

The intro to "Control" includes a C minor arpeggio. Did you fingerpick that?
No, that's a plectrum. It just sounds like a fingerpicking pattern. And I'm playing really softly. That's the thing about that song. When I originally wrote it, it was pretty much one volume all the way through. But when I did the recording, on the spur of the moment I came up with the idea of alternating from loud to soft to really fast. Every line starts out soft and then gets real loud at the end of line. The song really seemed to come to life when I did that.

The B7 to E minor chord change your play in the chorus to "The Past Recedes" has a real Beatles-esque, Ruber Soul feel about it. Was that intentional?
I definitely put a lot of time into studying the Beatles' music in the past few years. It might come out sometimes.

Although you use really simple, open chords shapes in that song, there's a kind of magic to it. I guess that's what every songwriter aspires to - to create something new with a couple of G, C and D chords.
I know. I'm really excited about using familiar chords and progressions in ways that are so in tune with the current of life that it gives the song a deep emotional feeling. Or using familiar chords and progressions with rhytms that never have been applied to them before. All this is completely opposite from the way I played when I made By the Way with the Chili Peppers, where I tried to make the songs harmonically unique by using interesting chords. At that time, I was studying Charles Mingus and the Beatles - anything I could get my hands on that relied on abnormal chords. I learned a lot from that, and I still use unusual chords here and there, but I've regained an excitement for what you can get with just an A minor, a D minor, a D and a C.
Sometimes it takes just living your life a certain way to be able to open yourself to the rhytm of the cosmos, to the point where you can use those familiar chords in the same way you might speak a few simple words of love to someone. A few of the most basic words in the language might be the most meaningful thing someone can hear, and the same can be said with basic chords.

---Alan DiPerna

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