Anthony Kiedis’ ‘Unique’ Challenge With New Chili Peppers Album
Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis said he’d faced a “unique situation” as he wrote lyrics for the group's upcoming album Unlimited Love.
He explained that the band had come up with so many songs for potential inclusion in the project that he struggled to keep up, and had to adopt a different approach to writing.
“I love all varieties of lyric writing, abstract being one of my favorites,” Kiedis recently told Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, “because so much has already been said in songs along the way that I like to find some new way of adding to a song lyrically that isn't predictable.”
“I had the challenge of being way behind schedule, [but] that's always the situation," the singer admitted. "The band will write 20 songs and I'll be like, ‘I’ll get to those lyrics post haste.’ But now I've got 20 songs to add to and then it was 20 more and then it was more."
“I had a unique situation in so much as I did not have the luxury of editing or censoring," Kiedis continued. "Whatever came I had to make use of… because there was too much waiting for me to get to. Usually I’ll be like, ‘Hmm, maybe, maybe not.’ But in this case, I was like, ‘If it came to me, it’s in the song. Next.’”
Kiedis cited the example of the band’s most recent single, “Not the One." “Every day after band practice, I ride home and I listen to what we’ve done that day over and over and over and over, hoping that it sparks something or that I hear the right melody or something – anything," he explained. "In that case, I started hearing that entire song on the way home, but completely inverted from the way Flea had arranged it."
“I think I was going through a very lonely and introspective month. This idea came about, ‘I think I know who you are, but maybe I don't. You think you know who I am, but maybe you don’t.’ … Especially in intimate relationships, like, we know we all present something and people always have an idea, but what would happen if we just showed each other our very worst from the very start?”
Unlimited Love will be released on April 1.
Listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Not the One’