There aren’t any clever sex references in the title of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ follow-up to Californication, but that doesn’t mean the music is without a kinky quotient.
“It’s going to spank your ass… in a good way,” singer Anthony Kiedis said Saturday at the ESPN Action Sports and Music Awards, where the band was given the Artist Contribution Award.
The LP will be titled By the Way, and although the Chili Peppers are spending a little more time than expected on it, a spokesperson for the band said the album is still due in late June.
“We could be [done], but we’re not,” Kiedis said. “We just keep going. I mean, we have enough to be done and finished, but instead we just keep going further. Just because we don’t stop. We can’t stop.”
Guitarist John Frusciante said much of the studio time has been spent giving the songs multiple layers.
“It’s much deeper, I would say, than the last record,” Frusciante said. “There’s a lot going on, I mean, [on] some songs. When it’s the right thing, it’s just the four of us playing, but there’s a lot of overdubs and a lot of work has gone into the production of it.”
Longtime Red Hot Chili Peppers producer Rick Rubin is again on board for By the Way, which Kiedis described as “rich.” “There isn’t really a definitive single screaming to be the first guy out of the block, but we’ll find it,” he said.
While in the studio, the Chili Peppers have recorded a cover of the Ramones’ “Havana Affair” for a tribute album due this summer that will also include Rob Zombie, Green Day, the Offspring and others.
“It doesn’t sound anything like their version of it,” Frusciante said. “It sounds like a song we could have written. Johnny [Ramone] thinks it’s better than the Ramones version, but I don’t agree with him on that.”
The Chili Peppers have two weeks of European festival dates scheduled for late June, after which Kiedis said the band may play a handful of American dates. “I imagine we’re going to want to play our new songs,” he said.
