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April/May 2005, Guitar World Acoustic (USA)
thanks to Caroline for typing it out
click the thumbnail for the scans

John Frusciante opens a window to his soul on the intimate, acoustic Curtains.

There are an infinite number of great songs out there,” says John Frusciante. “I don’t think we’ll ever exhaust the possibilities of a few simple guitar chords.” That the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist truly believes this was made clear when he recently recorded a series of six solo discs, which he then released at the rate of approximately one per month. Embracing styles from indie rock to electronica to “unplugged,” the recordings are a testament to the fertility of Frusciante’s imagination and the breadth of his musical tastes.
Curtains (Record Collection), the final disc in the series, is an album of primarily acoustic guitar-driven songs characterized by their poignant melodicism, occasionally eccentric structure and lyrics that are both abstractly philosophical and emotionally resonant. While Fruscainte has made extensive use of the acoustic on 2003’s Shadows Collide with People and other solo albums, Curtains is his most fully realized unplugged work to date. The guitarist skillfully augments his crisp acoustic chording and expressive vocals with overdubs on synthesizers and electric guitar, and he benefits from the tastefully minimalist backing of stand-up bassist Ken Wild, Autolux drummer Carla Azar and the Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez-Lopez on electric guitar. But mostly we hear Frusciante, who recorded Curtains in his living room, strumming and singing songs that express his unique notions about the nature of time, death and dimensions beyond our own.
Like the other five albums in the series, Curtains was recorded quickly and on vintage analog gear - in this instance an Ampex aight-track tape machine. Frusciante says he was out to capture both the warm sound of the pre-digital era and the inspired spontaneity of recordings from the Fifties and Sixties, when artists would typically have just one day to record a song and a few weeks to complete a entire album. One upside of this approach is that it enabled Frusciante to commit a huge body of work to tape in a short period of time.
“I write a lot of songs,” he says, “and they mean a great deal to me and represent my growth in a lot of ways. But as the guitar player in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I don’t have the time to record my own stuff as much as I’d like.”
So when the Chili Peppers recently took a half-year break after touring behind their last album, 2002’s By The Way, Frusciante made the most of the opportunity. “During those six months I recorded all the music that’s been coming out,” he says. “It’s basically material from the last three years, but each album also contains new things - half of Curtains, for example, was written during that break.”
Like Frusciante’s electric guitar playing in the Chili Peppers, his songs are fesh, inventive and more than a tad off kilter. Frusciante recognizes this and regards it as a strenght. “What I try to do,” he says, “is make words say what they weren’t naturally designed to say.”

Do you write all your songs on acoustic guitar?
Pretty much, although sometimes I write on an unamplified electric guitar.
I have a few old Martins, two small-bodied 0-15’s and an 0-18, at my house that date from the Forties. I usually write songs on one of those. And I always bring a couple of acoustic guitars on the road with me to write with.
Writing songs on an unamplified electric has its drawbacks. The guitar is so quiet that I sometimes sing in a high falsetto voice that doesn’t really work when I do the final recording. So I’ve learned to write on the acoustic and actually sing in the style that I want to use on the final recording.

There is a very intimate quality about Curtains, partly, no doubt, because you recorded the songs in your living room.
Yeah. It was just me sitting on a pillow on my living room floor, with my back leaning against the couch. There was a Neuman KM54 microphone on my guitar and a Telefunken 250 mic for my vocals. I would just go back and forth between my living room and the library, which is now the control room, and listen to what I’d done.
Sometimes [engineer] Ryan Hewitt and I would splice together two different takes.

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