Chad Smith on Writing New RHCP LP ‘From Thin Air,’ Befriending Will Ferrell
When Chad Smith joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1988 he had little reason to think it was a long-term proposition. The group had been through three drummers in the previous five years, and guitarist Hillel Slovak had died months earlier. “I remember right after I joined we did a photo shoot for Spin or something,” Smith tells Rolling Stone. “I’m standing on a rock somewhere in Malibu with a sock on my dick and I’m like, ‘I wonder how long this is gonna last? I don’t know about this, but it seems like something to do right now.'”
It’s 28 years later and the group is still going strong, and on Friday they released their new album The Getaway. We talked with Smith about the new LP, RHCP’s ongoing world tour, the status of Chickenfoot and his new comedic partnership with celebrity look-alike Will Ferrell.
I’ve really been enjoying the new album
You’re a man of good taste!
How did the process begin?
Well, we wrote some songs for probably nine months, which we normally do, and we were getting ready to record when my man Flea broke his arm snowboarding. So everything ground to a halt. He really did a number on himself. It took six months to heal. During that time we kind of reassessed our approach. Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton said to us, “I love your songs. I can help make them better, but if you really want to use my talents, you should go into my studio and just write a bunch from scratch.”
At first we were like, “Wait a minute. … I don’t know. We’ve done this for a long time and it seems to work.” But once we embraced it and were open to this new way to grow and change we were really able to challenges ourselves, and thank God we did because we came up with another batch. Probably six of the 13 songs on the record are the ones that we wrote with Brian in the studio, and the ones we had from before he helped us make them better.
How did the idea of working with Danger Mouse first come up?
We know him and the bands he’s worked with. We actually toured with Gnarls Barkley. Our guitar player Josh [Klinghoffer] was their keyboardist when we toured together. We had mutual friends and when his name came up we were like, “Yeah, let’s talk to Brian.” It was pretty simple.
How was his process different from other producers that you’ve worked with in the past?
He comes from a hip-hop, for lack of a better word to describe it, process where you start with a beat. We would just listen to different kinds of music and come up with stuff we both sort of liked, a vibe or whatever, and then I would go in and just play the drums. We’d go back and forth on suggestions, and then it would get laid down. Then Flea would come and play the bass on that. And then Josh would come in and play keys or guitar or whatever we needed. We sort of built it like that.