Rollingstone.com had an interview with Anthony Kiedis in his Los Angeles home. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:
Anthony Kiedis is sitting in the living room of his Los Angeles home, holding his heart in his hands: a pair of plain-looking advance CDs containing the twenty-eight songs on the Red Hot Chili Peppers' new double album, Stadium Arcadium. ''Love and women, pregnancies and marriages, relationship struggles -- those are real and profound influences on this record,'' the band's singer says in a deep, thoughtful voice.
''And it's great,'' he adds quickly, ''because it wasn't just me writing about the fact that I'm in love. It was everybody in the band. We were brimming with energy based on falling in love.''
And staying in it. Kiedis, bassist Flea, guitarist John Frusciante and drummer Chad Smith took nearly two years to write, record and obsessively refine the psychedelic swagger and atomic singalong pop on Stadium Arcadium. Smith also got married (his second time around) and became a first-time dad (again), while Flea -- who has a teenage daughter by a previous marriage -- has a new baby girl, Sunny, with his fiancee, Frankie Rayder.
Kiedis and Frusciante are both still single but spoken for. Frusciante is going out with a singer, Emily Kokal. And as Kiedis talks, perched on the edge of an overstuffed chair in front of a huge stone fireplace, his girlfriend Heather can be heard rattling around next door in the kitchen, making a pot of tea.
''I could show you a line or two in every song that speaks of all that,'' Kiedis claims. Then he does exactly that, going through Stadium Arcadium track-by-track, noting the references to commitment in general and Heather in particular in the ballads ''Desecration Smile'' and ''Hard to Concentrate,'' the droning folk of ''If'' and the funk hardball, ''Charlie.'' He cites the affection and crisis in ''So Much I,'' ''Wet Sand'' and ''C'mon Girl.'' The first verse in ''She's Only 18'' came, Kiedis says, when he found that Heather was ''decidedly disinterested in the Rolling Stones. Here's a band loved by hundreds of millions, and she was like, 'I could care less.' '' He grins. ''It seemed like a great way to start a song.''
Read the intire interview at www.rollingstone.com
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