The demos were made while we were writing By the Way. When we actually recorded [Shadows], it was built into the songs that there was going to be a lot of harmonies, but I didn't want to overdo it, because on By the Way I had done so many. ...
On The Will to Death, I thought it would be a good idea to make a record with very little backing vocals, because we'd done it so much on Shadows. I always have to have a new idea for each album. For The Will to Death, the idea was to have very little backing vocals. There's a lot of other huge differences. In every way, I wanted the opposite of Shadows.

AC: Where does your music come from? Some musicians say they're simply channeling it.
JF: Since I was 4 I've had deep feelings for music. By the time I was 7, I started becoming obsessed about the groups I liked. By the time I was 10, 11, music was the only thing that made life meaningful to me. My excitement about music is what led me to play the guitar in the first place – as well as feelings of pain inside me that I didn't know where to direct.
Once I found music as a place to put that energy, I became a much more relaxed person, because I was starting to get aggravated at the age I started playing guitar, when I was, like, 12. I was getting very frustrated and angry, and once I started being able to learn punk songs and bash on my guitar, I became the peaceful person that I'm supposed to be.
It also must come from painful things from when I was a kid, but in general, that stuff takes place on a subconscious level. The most obvious place that it seems to come from is just because I sit around listening to music all the time. It's the most important thing to me. If I'm on tour, I have my headphones on all the time. I'm always playing music. When we go backstage, I go immediately to the CD player, I put on music. I have music going on all the time. Then once I have a chance to sit still and write, ideas start coming to me for songs. It's usually inspired by something that I'm listening to.
At the same time, philosophically, I've definitely been made aware throughout my life – especially during the five years that I wasn't a part of the human race – that the actual human being itself is not responsible for the ... generator of the music. Music is generated by another realm that's not ... I could talk about it. It gets on a more intellectual level.
Basically, it's a realm of thought, where thoughts actually create life-forms. If you imagine that every thought in your head, every thought anybody's ever thought didn't just disappear. Every thought left somebody's head and went out into some faraway place in outer space. Every thought that's ever been thought exists there. Some doctor explained to me that thoughts send out thought waves into the atmosphere, and I realized there's a realm of thought, and those thoughts end up creating life-forms and personalities within the realm of thought. Our thoughts are connected to that place and we learn from that place and that place learns from us. Every thought anybody's ever thought is there, so all knowledge is there. The characters there exist completely with all the knowledge the human race has ever had to offer in all history, but they can't do anything with that knowledge, because they're not people. They don't exist in a place of time.
It's a realm of thought. There's no time there. They can't actually write a song, or write a book, or paint a painting or anything, because they're just thoughts. They have personalities and life-forms just like we do, and they have the ability to communicate with us on a conscious level, whereas we communicate with them, but we do it all subconsciously. We don't realize it's happening.

AC: What's your relationship to death?
JF: [Long pause] Well, it's something that I don't see as being separate from life. ...
Whenever there's any kind of fear of failure, or fear of not being successful, or fear of not being good, those are all just different versions of fear of death. All those things are fear of death. I think the difference between my life before I took my five years away from doing anything and after is that I was scared of so many things before, never realizing that at the heart of it was just a stupid fear of death. Luckily I had a lot of supernatural experiences that made me see clearly what was going on with death. That it was something that was with me all the time, not something that was going to happen to me someday. The spirits in the place where people's consciousness continues after they're dead are helping me all the time. They're with me all the time.
Now, this time around, I'm playing music with no fear of any kind. Yeah, it comes up every now and then because I'm human, but I have enough experience and knowledge to understand that at the root of it I'm all right because I'm not afraid of dying. It gives me the ability to continue, to always be clear about my purpose here, to always be clear about just who I am, to always be able to face myself. Fear gets in your way of being able to really face yourself, be honest to yourself about who you are.

AC: On your first two solo LPs, Niandra LaDes & Usually Just a T-Shirt (1994) and Smile From the Streets You Hold (1997), a certain amount of fear is palpable, because by To Record Only Water for 10 Days (2001), so is a joy that hadn't been there previously. Is that fair to say?
JF: Yeah. Those first two albums, Smile and Niandra LaDes, a lot of the music was done during a time that I was very happy, but I still wasn't very clear. I didn't know what was going on. I almost felt like I was making music by mistake or something, because I wasn't clear with myself.