Dallas Music Guide: Something that stands out on “The Will to Death” is the use of piano on

the track “The Mirror.” It was a pretty interesting combination to hear your voice and the
piano together – what inspired you to give that a shot?

John Frusciante: Well, I wrote that song about three years ago when I was playing piano a lot,
and I think that the sort of classical feeling on something like “Because,” by The Beatles…I
was inspired by something like that in terms of trying to do something that was just a piano
part on its own, then just singing vocals over it. In terms of the way that I…there are more
piano songs coming up. The collaboration album that Josh and I did, we both do piano song –
he does one and I do one, and on that album, both of the piano songs were done live with me
singing and playing piano and singing at the same time, and on Josh’s, he plays piano and
sings at the same time. That has its own kind of exciting live feeling to it, and there’s a piano
song on the album that will come out in December, as well. I love playing piano, it’s a
beautiful instrument, and especially with this thing that I have – it’s an EMT-250 Reverb – it
looks like R2D2, and it’s about the same size as R2D2. It was the first digital reverb, and it
was what Brian Eno used on a lot of those ambient piano albums. That thing is just the key to
getting this really beautiful piano sound, so we used that on “The Mirror,” and it’s just one of
the best ways to get a really great sound.

DMG: On much of your previous work, your lyrics were delivered in an almost proverb-style
– not seemingly about things that were too specific or certain events, but more about the way
things are and how you perceive the world. The track “Far Away” seems to stray from that a
bit, as it seems more specific and perhaps a bit more personal. How did that one come about?

JF: I write a fair amount of songs like that, especially if I’m in a relationship with somebody, I
seem to end up writing a lot of songs that say that we need to break up, [laughs] which is what
that song is about. With most of those songs that I write, I don’t feel comfortable about
releasing them or even playing them for other people. In the case of “Far Away,” for some
reason I felt comfortable about putting it on the album. There’s been other situations where
I’ve left songs like that off of an album because it’s just too personal. It’s nice for variety, to
have something that’s personal. To me, actually, my other songs are more personal, because
my other songs are about my actual feelings inside, and about the way that I’m actually
thinking about the things that I’ve seen and things like that, whereas a song like “Far Away” is
about a sort of interruption that occurs in your life that takes the form of a relationship, but to
me, a song about a relationship seems to be more personal…but it’s more like seeing
something that’s somebody else’s private life or something and having that in a song, whereas
the other kind of personal is like looking in somebody’s notebook, or reading somebody’s
diary or something. To me, I feel closer to a songwriter if I hear something like that.

For instance, I think Jean-Luc Godard films – in his movies, he was accused of…in these
movies that he’s made now in the 90s, and in his last film, of not being as personal as he was
in the 60s. To me, his movies in the 90s are more personal than his movies in the 60s. His
movies in the 60s were about these more romantic situations or whatever, but his movies in
the 90s are his own thoughts – his movies in the 90s are like you opened up his notebook, and
I feel closer to somebody seeing something like that, and that’s why my songs are more
general – they’re more like ideas rather than things about my personal life.

To me, the real world and the various interactions we have with other human beings and
things like that – that’s not really…for me, that’s not the core of what life is about. For me, the
really important things about life are what takes place inside of people…the things that have
nothing to do with the course of time or anything like that, but the things that take place
within. That’s what I’m interested in hearing in music and that’s what I’m interested in in
terms of my writing. I do like a personal song now and then – I’m definitely a sucker for
songs about love and things like that. Sometimes I wish that I could feel totally comfortable
with writing songs about love like the doo-wop songs of the 50s or something. I definitely
love that kind of music, and there’s something about the simplicity of those kinds of lyrics
that I love. And that’s why I do, occasionally, write songs like that, but they just don’t seem to
make it onto my records because for that reason that they just seem too personal.

DMG: Well, I’m glad you opted to stick it on there, it’s my favorite one on the record.

JF: Cool – sometimes, you know what I think? I think that I should eventually take those
songs and give them to someone else to record. Because then they won’t be as personal
[laughs]. Sometimes I also have a problem with songs that are too pop-sounding or
something. Maybe someday I’ll give them to a pop singer [laughs].

DMG: Sometimes people – even people that are really passionate about music – grow
disillusioned with it, and say something like, “This is what I cared so much about…these little
notes?” Have you ever had a period where you weren’t interested in music and felt sort of
removed from it?

JF: [yelling] That’s bullshit! I don’t think that music is just little notes. Music is energy, and
energy is the single most important form of it in the world. Without energy, there is no life.
The only difference between a dead person and a live person is the energy, the electricity
flowing inside their system, and that’s what makes music. You can’t make a good record with
people who have no life inside them and people who are totally bored just playing the notes.
Yeah, the Velvet Underground could have taught four fucking businessmen who knew how to
play instruments their songs, and they would have played the same fucking notes, but would it
have been the same music? Fuck, no. It would have been crap. Music is what it is because of
the energy.

If I feel totally drab one day, and I try to record a song, and then I feel totally alive another
day and I try to record the same song, the one that I recorded when I had the life flowing
through me is going to be a the one that’s good. There was a time in my life where my energy
was not flowing right inside me. I knew, technically, how to put notes together and how to put
chords together to make songs. To write a song, you need to have a flow of energy from the
second you get the idea until the song is finished. Your energy has to be flowing. You have to
have a feeling inside, and you have to grab a hold of that feeling, and you don’t let go of it
until the song is finished. At the time that my energy wasn’t flowing right inside me, I was
incapable of doing that. If I had an idea for a song, yeah I could start it, but it just tended to go
off in nothingness, and it started to drift and drift until I lost interest in doing it and I couldn’t
really find anywhere interesting to go. You have to have a lot of energy to write music, and
that’s what the music is.

The notes are the least important part of music. There’s a lot of great music that doesn’t even
have notes, but the people that make it are people of great personal power and personal
conviction and people who life means something to. Someone like this guy, Rosy Parlane,
who just put out a great record, it’s called “Iris,” I think. It’s on Touch Records. There are very
little notes on that album. It’s not about notes, it’s mostly sounds. But it’s such an incredible,
beautiful energy inside of it that to me, it sounds like listening to a great pop record or a great
rock record or a great classical record or whatever. The notes don’t matter at all. Aside from
notes, you have to remember that it’s a combination of rhythm, notes and texture. Music is not
just notes. Rhythm, notes and texture. The notes have a correlation to the way that life goes up
and down and the notes go up and down. Inwardly we go up and down, and notes go up and
down. That’s what they mean to us. When you put chords behind it, it starts to work into
appealing to your subconscious in a way that expresses things that we can’t intellectually
express.

You can say things with music that there’s no way to say with words. The meaning is much
more than anyone can say with words. The reason for that is that music plays directly to our
subconscious. We feel what we feel when we listen to music because it’s playing with our
subconscious. Billboards that we see when we drive around play with our subconscious, the
media plays with our subconscious, and commercials play with our subconscious. But those
things fuck with your subconscious, those things hurt your subconscious, and those things
confuse your subconscious. Music puts your subconscious back in order, music gives your
subconscious some sort of semblance of order and some sort of feeling of beauty, and that’s
why we feel what we feel when we listen to it. Especially somebody who’s had a fucked-up
life, we need that – we need to feel like everything makes sense. At the end of the day when I
sit down after doing everything that I need to do for the day, and I sit there in front of my
speakers and I listen to some beautiful music, it puts everything in place, and I feel like the
whole world is perfect. That is not stupid. That is the most important part of my day. It doesn’t
matter what I’ve accomplished that day, or shit, how much money I’ve made that day, or
anything like that doesn’t mean anything. What matters is at the end of the day where I can sit
there, put on a Velvet Underground record, and the world is perfect, nothing is wrong with it.
Everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be. That’s how I feel when I hear music, and
that’s how it’s been my whole life.