“Black Summer”
“THROUGH ALL THE time that I wasn’t in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, there were only a few years that I was even using guitar in my music. But I kept on practicing, because practicing is something I do to stimulate the brain in interesting ways. I still hadn’t written any songs, though. But now the possibility of me rejoining the band came into the air when Flea started talking to me about it, and so I picked up my guitar and I went, ‘Hmmm… I wonder if I can still write a rock song?’ Because my whole sense of melody had switched to a completely different vocabulary.
“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
