The following is a list of quotes directly from John Frusciante guitarist of Red Hot Chili Peppers while talking to guitarworld.com in regards to each song listed.
1) Black Summer
-“My memory of it is that I picked up my guitar and Black Summer came out. I wrote the initial idea for the verse and the chorus. I had a verse and chorus melody, too, but Anthony made up his own melody for the chorus and only used my melody that I had for the verse. And the thing he did in the chorus is way better than what I did originally. ”
-“One thing I’m very into is chord changes, where the chords are almost like a melody, and they’re not dependent on the bass line moving with them. “
-“The changes and the little modulation things that take place in Black Summer, the fact that there’s an A major chord in the chord progression in the verse, but then there’s an A minor chord in the next line, simple little things like that are the kind of things that I find interesting.”
2) Veronica
-“I’m a big fan of tempo changes. It’s one of my favorite things about Black Sabbath – their first four records have all these tempo changes that take place within the same song. Another example would be Some Velvet Morning by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra or We Can Work It Out by the Beatles.”
-“I thought, ‘That’s something we don’t have on any of our songs – a chorus that’s a completely different feel and tempo than the verse. And that became the object of Veronica. The verse is in 4/4, but the chorus has a triplet feel. :
3) The Heavy Wing
-“I started the song with just a simple funk riff. Because of my obsession with breakbeats and electronic music, I listen to a lot of funk music from the late Sixties and early Seventies. And so I thought, ‘I’ll start out with a riff that sounds like you could be getting into a funk song, but then it’ll go into this psychedelic world.”
-“The guitar in the verse is treated with the modular synth, just to give it some subtle sonic movement. And in the breakdown before the solo, you hear the same guitar playing the same part as in the intro to the song, but being sent through a more pronounced modular treatment.”
4) Tangelo
“The overdubs on this one were fun. I remember it was the very last day we were in the recording phase of the album, and I was supposed to be going home that day. I felt like I didn’t have anything left inside me. I felt completely drained. And then I thought, ‘Let me just try a little thing…’
“I started with one Mellotron, and then I wound up overdubbing synths and Mellotrons feverishly for, like, three hours, coming up with those parts that start in the second verse and go up until the last verse. It felt like it lifted the song to this other level.
5) The Great Apes
“The Great Apes was something Flea brought in. In the chorus, the guitar part I play is just what his bass line brought out of me. It’s definitely a Fugazi-inspired thing. At the outro, Flea and I do this switch. For most of the song, during the chorus I’m playing the melody we’ve been talking about and Flea’s playing the chord changes. But when it goes to the outro, I’m playing Flea’s chord changes and he’s playing my melody.”
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