My Radio's My Heart - A conversation with John Frusciante
EC: Congratulations on your new release, "Shadows Collide With People"---the press I've seen has been fantastic. 3 stars from Rolling Stone, a rave from the London Times. Are you psyched?
JF: Those things are all well & good but for me I was psyched at the end of making the record.
EC: It's a thing of the past?
JF: It's already behind me now. It's always nice to be appreciated, but onward & upward. I'm more concerned with going forward & doing new things.
EC: Great, that's what I want to talk to you about. Where you are now?
JF: Yeah I'm proud of the record I'm glad that people like it. But I am very much in the state of mind of doing new things. But I have been avoiding talking about what I'm doing now because it's frustrating for people to hear about things that aren't available yet. So it's better for me just to talk about the album that exists now, and it's an album I'm really proud of.
EC: As a longtime fan I'm really happy with it as well; it's sitting well with me personally. I just wanted to share that the first time I saw you was in '89, we were both 19. You've certainly come a long way since then. I was wondering if you could talk about your work with Brian Eno (legendary Talking Heads/U2 producer) at all?
JF: He came to one of our shows in England with his kid and I was really excited to meet him because he's been a hero of mine since I was a little kid. And he invited me over to his studio and we spent a day just listening to records and stuff and taking a walk and we ended up recording some stuff mainly because he wanted to show me a sort of a set-up he had for processing the guitar. And to demonstrate it we recorded me soloing on the guitar. So I recorded some guitar soloing and he ended up building a song around it. And it came out really good; I really liked the song he did. He's going to release the song. I've been really focused on the modular synthesizer in the last couple of years & he gave me some interesting tips on that whole world. Just ways of doing things that you wouldn't think of doing because they're technically wrong. Basically just using it in an unorthodox way. Actually that one day that we spent together really ended up having a big influence on the direction I've gone in musically since then.
EC: Yeah that's why I asked the question. I would imagine that it really lit a fire for you. I would see kindred spirits getting together and you really taking something away from that. <
JF: Yeah I did. My music, my whole approach to the synthesizer has completely changed now. I don't really use it anymore for the oscillator or tone generator. It means basically I'm using the synthesizer more to change the sounds of other things rather than to use it as the source of the sound. Basically I'm using it in a much more subtle way. You could listen to a recording and you could think it was a recording from the 60's because the things with the synthesizer are so subtle they end up making things they end up making the basic timbre of the various musical elements you can tell something different is going on but you can't tell what it is that's making it sound strange. I'm going in that direction rather than the 80's synth-pop direction where it's more obvious you're hearing a synthesizer.
EC: In your live shows, in addition to playing your originals, you cover an interesting array of great bands & songwriters from the past such as Joy Division, Radiohead, Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John & REM. I've also seen it written that your recent influences include Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, Human League & other famous synth- driven bands. Talk about how that influence happened for you? Did you seek out this music or did someone introduce you to it?
JF: That was stuff I was listening to a lot while we were making Californication & while we were writing By The Way, but for this last year and a half it's been more really experimental electronic music and British folk rock and Velvet Underground & Talking Heads.
EC: Of course, some of your staples, right?
JF: I've been going back to something like Velvet Underground, I listened to it so much all through my 20's basically. For a couple of years I didn't listen to it as much. Right now my taste is going more for things that are organic where the people are using all the sonic possibilities in interesting ways. Where people are pushing the boundaries of what you can do with texture of music but not doing it with a synthesizer which is such an easy sort of route to do it with. I'm also very impressed with the best people in experimental electronic world, like Peta and Eckart Aillers and Finez and Jim O'Rourke and Oren Umbarci and Francesco Lopez. Most of them use the computer as their main instrument.