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May 2006, X-Press Online (Ireland)
thanks to Abby, for getting it, as it was subscription-only

All four members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers have reconvened at the infamous Chateau Marmont on Sunset Strip in Hollywood. The band used these bungalows at the side of the hotel to write and record part of its last album, the multi-platinum, international chart-topper By The Way. Four years on they're back here, the occasion this time being the press launch of the Chili Peppers' ninth studio album, the epic, double-disc, 28-song Stadium Arcadium, out Saturday, May 13. Emilt Waters reports.

Media from around the world has been flown into town to get a first listen to the new music and talk to band members. But the ambitious album isn't finished yet. So the media get to hear only 21 songs, in no particular order.

While Flea, Anthony Kiedis and Chad Smith start doing their interviews in various rooms upstairs, guitarist John Frusciante remains downstairs, talking on the phone to one of the engineers that is still working on completing the record. Frusciante delivers minutely-detailed instructions of the changes he wants made. A little more volume here, a touch less reverb there.

For Stadium Arcadium, Frusciante has stepped to the fore, essentially seizing control of what the massive recording would ultimately sound like, working closely with producer Rick Rubin.

It's proved an enormous job. After nine months of recording, not only was there an original batch of 38 songs to finish - the band had originally planned to release three discs worth of new songs - but each track has an enormous amount of music within itself.

"Some of these songs have 71 channels that they are using on the board," says Frusciante. "That's 71 different things to be balancing. I had a whole 24-track machine just for my backing vocals and a whole 24-track machine just for the guitar overdubs and another 24-track machine for the band. We had three 24-track machines going at once for these songs, so they are a real job to mix."

Frusciante admits that, at first, the other guys in the band weren't too sure about following his vast vision for the record. "For a long time, I don't think we knew if we were going to be happy with the direction that each other went," he says. "At one point, I don't know if everybody was trusting of how it was going to be for me to mix everything the way that I was envisioning in it. Because I did do so many overdubs, they didn't realise it would be able to be placed perfectly.

"We had a little tension before the mixing started because Flea thought he was going to want it different than me. Anthony thought he was going to want it different. It ended up that once we mixed the first song, we realised that everybody was liking the same thing. But it is this huge pressure when you've gone as far as I've gone.

"For this album, I did a lot of vocal harmony, I did a lot of guitar overdubs. Luckily, they all ended up serving the song really well, which was my original intention. When you're a guy that's just stuck in a room trying to write lyrics every day, you can't step outside yourself that far to see clearly where someone else is going. You've just got to trust. Luckily, we've got that trust and we always end up agreeing on everything but we don't always know we are going to agree on everything."

If there's one word that best sums up the 28 songs of Stadium Arcadium, it is, not surprisingly, variety. There's funk, heavy stuff, punk, often all mashed into one. Frusciante says that this broad scope of the album started taking shape following abandoned recording sessions two years ago. "We were doing a lot of folk music combined with heavy metal," he reveals. "We would start out as a folk song and then build to a punk thing or a heavy metal thing. It was a good experiment but I feel that what we have done right now is a lot more fluid and a lot more seamless. As songwriters, for us the challenge is to find new ways of peaking other than the obvious ways."

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