JOHN FRUSCIANTE o THE EMPYREAN

The Empyrean

The Empyrean is my new record and will be released worldwide via Record Collection on January 20th 2009. It was recorded on and off between December 2006 and March 2008. It is a concept record that tells a single story both musically and lyrically. The story takes place within one person, and there are two characters. It contains a version of Tim Buckley’s, ‘Song To The Siren’ and the rest of the songs are written by me. My friend Josh plays on it, as does Flea. It also features Sonus Quartet, Johnny Marr and The New Dimension Singers. I’m really happy with it and I’ve listened to it a lot for the psychedelic experience it provides. It should be played as loud as possible and it is suited to dark living rooms late at night.

- John Frusciante, November 3rd, 2008

The Empyrean - part two

The Empyrean is a story that has no action in the physical world. It all takes place in one persons mind throughout his life. The only other character is someone who does not live in the physical world but is inside it, in the sense that he exists in peoples minds. The mind is the only place that anything can be truly said to exist. The outside world is only known to us as it appears within us by the testament of our senses. The imagination is the most real world that we know because we each know it first hand. Seeing our ideas take form is like being able to see the sun come into being. We have no equivelent to the purity of that in our account of the outside world. The outer world appears to each of us as one thing and it is always also a multitude of others. Inside to outside and outside to inside are neverending. Trying and giving up are a form of breathing.

- John, November 24 2008

The Empyrean - part three

My describing The Empyrean as a story is accurate from my viewpoint, but misleading, as there are no road signs to lead someone else to perceive a clear story out of it. There was no intention to write what would be seen as clear-cut story, though it is one to me. Being that it takes place in the mind of one person, no laws of time and space, or concrete relationships exist therein. This is to say that if you look into it with your logical brain you will only strain yourself and come up with nothing. The words were specifically written to document an inner experience of life, the kind that a person has extreme difficulty translating to anyone else. Part of the intention was to write words to connect with other people who have been, or are, overwhelmed by the confusing, inescapable inner world they must live in. Equal attention was given to writing words that would gently direct themselves towards the listeners’ intuitive brain, and their sub-conscience, which I believe comprehends and catalogues everything in a much richer and more multi layered way than our conscious mind. Like a lot of lyrics, it was written to be perceived in as many ways as there are people hearing it. A person to whom the words have no clear, conscious meaning may derive more from it than someone who reads it as I do, and so I recommend hearing or reading it however you will. It would have been simpler to say nothing at all but this only fully occurred to me today, as I have gradually realized that by saying what it is to me, I am encouraging people to see it my way and to me, that’s not what rock lyrics are for. I believe rock lyrics should be open to interpretation and I wrote these so they could be. While I could explain the story as I see it that would detract from the potential multifarious meanings that will come about from people applying their own sense of feeling from their life experience, much as they always do.

John Frusciante, January 5th, 2009

The Empyrean

An Introduction to the Description

Here are some thoughts I have about the story of The Empyrean. I don’t think they detract from anyone reading their own things into it, but they provide a guideline through which to see the basic form of the lyrics more clearly. I’m just explaining the way I see the outline, but the contents and the details remain open to interpretation. I avoided discussing any of this in the small amount of press I did. In those I just try to be myself. These ideas are too dear to me to let someone else filter them. I’m posting this only because these ideas may be of some value to some people. Not as a way of trying to inspire interest in my work.

When I buy a record I like, I listen without reading the lyrics the first time. Then I read the lyrics at some point later (maybe on the second listen, maybe months later). Often years later I’ve enjoyed hearing what the artist says about what they’ve done. But to be honest if it was someone I liked I’d want to know the second I could. Anyhow, I suggest using your own discretion in choosing when to read both the lyrics and the following description of them.

Also, throughout the making of this record, I felt that some force was expressing itself through me, and so I don’t claim that my understanding of it is at all definitive. But since a story such as this would have helped me at various times in my life, I figured I’d make it as clear as I think would be necessary for someone else to benefit from its contents, and to possibly outwit fate and conditioning in their own way.

Description to the Story of The Empyrean

The main character is a creative person who experiences the full spectrum of life’s ups and downs. All dialogue takes place in his mind. The other character could accurately be called the creative force, which constantly creates and perpetuates existence. It could also be called the energy which fuels the engine we call the mind, with all of its creative potential. It could also accurately be called ones true self. It sometimes takes the form of a voice in your in your head or voices in your head. The more out of step your actions are with your true self or the creative force, the more disruptive those voices will be. This serves as a guide. This characters action is usually on track enough to where, when he hears the force as a voice, it speaks truth. The main character is, to one degree or another, in a perpetual state of confusion.

On the path to merging with the force, material life and the self (the fluctuating, impermanent self as determined by conditioning and environment) will at times seem meaningless, leaving one feeling stranded. The main character goes through extreme loneliness (in song two and the first half of song five) and at times thinks he can only merge with this force upon dying. In the 8th song of the story, a kind of suicide takes place, which results in a rebirth. It could be actual death or a shedding of the unnecessary parts of the personality. In any case, a rebirth takes place (songs 9 and 10) in which he finds himself filled with wonderment in regards to life. The more someone’s actions are aligned with the creative force inherent in everything we know, the more that persons imagination will become one with that persons surroundings.
He eventually realizes that the highest point in heaven is a potential inside him, and that no thing is any different than anything else. What is beyond him is inside him and inside everyone. And that the feelings within him are perfectly suited to the opportunities to be creative here on earth. The attempt to be one with that force is an ongoing challenge that is such a privilege, the fruits of which make all the confusion of the path part of the privilege. He realizes that the ways in which the imaginations source is hidden from him are guides and road signs to help him become one with that source by means of his own resourcefulness. He realizes that confusion and pain have been as much the cause of what’s made his life meaningful and pleasureful as things he mistook for being pure goodness. Everything here contains its contradiction and so up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards, happy and sad, pleasure and pain, are each two things, which are one. And all things we believe to be separate are one thing. The illusion of separateness is the cause of pain, and it is also part of the cause of all the works of beauty people have created. Things like social position, positions of power, identification of the self with the body, identification of the self with ones thought patterns, are all false (though obviously very conceivable as true). False in that they are useless to the true self. To live by them is like giving in to the illusion of separateness and accepting it as reality. This amounts to nothing and matters only to the transient aspects of what you are. All that matters to your true, permanent self is to do what you are here to do. To establish direct contact with your true self and follow the course of action your heart dictates. Not to say that that means you will always be happy and content, but along the way you will know the meaning of pure happiness at the times when it comes. Not the shallow happiness of satisfaction in feeling you have more possessions than someone else, or have more money and power, or a prettier face, but happiness that comes from living in harmony with the same force that sets possibility into motion to become actuality. Happiness derived from the beauty of the things that come through the channels within you. From listening with your inner ears and seeing with your inner eyes. Happiness in seeing something within you manifest as something around you. Pain sets us to work and gives us a basis out of which to create works, which inspire pleasure, in the same way that darkness gives the sun a basis through which to shine light. The triumphant aspect of feeling great depends on one having absorbed pain. Appreciating your own value can be achieved to whatever degree you have faced feelings of your own worthlessness. Opposites give one another their meaning.

The record documents the ways in which a person strives for what is beyond his reach. In his effort to go higher with every step, he sometimes dives down, only to find that when he reemerges he is always higher than he was before. The musical dynamics work in tandem with these inner rises and falls he experiences. He necessarily remains in a state of confusion and longing but is grateful for that, as without that he would not be becoming anything. Growing and changing is its own reward, and it is sometimes necessary to stop in order to be rejuvenated. It may even be necessary to resent the universe and its creative force from time to time. But meaning is meaning and emptiness is emptiness and a person who can distinguish between them will always come around to embrace the space into which everything is created. And, upon death, this space of complete potential will give everyone a kiss, without exception. The story of this record is one mans reaching for something outside him and finding that it was always within him

John Frusciante, January 20th, 2009

“Poem”

Here is a poem that reflects the composition of the story in The Empyrean. I don’t feel that reading any of these posts is essential to the album. They are just my way of offering something to people who are interested.

The following words vaguely express the lyrical and musical form:

From within confusion and darkness,

Reaching up to the source of light,

Trying,

Giving up,

Climbing,

Resting,

Going up,

Going down,

Dying,

Being reborn,

Darkness becomes lighter,

Confusion becomes clearer,

Up,up,up.

John Frusciante, January 22nd, 2009[/i]

MUSIC RADAR INTERVEV :

Joe Bosso:
(...) I've been listening to it all week, now The Empyrean, if I understand it right, means THE PLACE OF THE HIGHEST HEAVEN, is that correct?

John Frusciante:
I understand it means THE HIGHEST POINT IN HEAVEN.

In the case of the record I think I was more using the highest point in heaven as a symbol for the things in life that we're all reaching for and those things that are sort of out of our ???, but yet there's some spark inside us that ??????? us to wanna reach for them and to wanna bring ourselves to greater heights, whether it's on an instrument, whether it's... whatever it is, as human beings we just have this need to reach and... to reach new heights and often they're totally out of our ??? but that doesn't make it less reasonable to reach for it, there is always a quote the writer William B???? used to always quote, which was that there's... there's no goal more worth fighting to ??? and... I'm paraphrasing, but it's that there's no goal more worthy of fighting to obtain immortality, you know, and... and, it's just, well I don't think it is good to... to always be sort of believing that the grass is greener on the other side, I... I really believe in pushing yourselves to... to reach heights that may seem far off, but... but to just push yourself to get there. And, in my case, that's all with music, you know, it's... it's, umm... I just... I've just always tried to reach new heights and it's also one of the things of the record that sometimes in your journey giving up, sometimes can be giving up for a period of time or can actually be a way of regenerating enough energy to keep pushing higher, you know, and musically ????????? the lyrics, the… the music on my record repeatedly keeps sort of going from a murky kind of low to a… to a peek, and then down form the peek and then to another low, and then keeps reaching up again and going higher and higher, and then going down again, and it’s, for me that’s like a form of breathing, you know, there’s been times in my life where I just painted and stopped even playing music, you know, and there’s been times in my life where I stopped thinking so creatively on my instrument and started thinking purely technically, and I think that all those things had a value even though it’s not something I’d wanna… you know, they’re not things you desire to do, but I think in the process of trying to go up and up and up, I don’t think just solidly to do nothing but going up and up and constantly reaching and pushing yourself, I think eventually that produces a kind of ??? where you won’t be able to go up any higher, where you can actually in the long run gain more momentum if you listen to you clock inside and you may have to occasionally give up or, in a symbolic sense, you might have to die in order to be reborn.

Joe Bosso:
What I can definitely hear on this record is you’re constantly changing your style, constantly ???, actually disregarding one style after you’ve done it both as an instrumentalist and as a vocalist. How do you go about that process?

John Frusciante:
Well, I don’t think it is disregarding obviously, ‘cause I really love the whole record from beginning to end, but it… it’s more just… yeah, just switching it up, and changing, and trying to approach each song differently and trying to sort of… like in singing, like try to… try to sort of find a different character for each song, I think it really helped me to… nobody was around when I recorded my vocals, so being by myself I found myself, it was much easier to sort of have fun with it and do a lot of takes until I really was having more and more fun each time as opposed to when you do it with an engineer a lot of times you can’t deal with humiliation of having to do more than a couple of takes or whatever, and it gets frustrating if you have to do any more after that, whereas… but when you’re by yourself sometimes you do fifteen takes and the fifteenth on is like YEAH, you know, so I found myself having more and more fun with it every time that I did it, messing around more every time and stuff. As far as soloing, you know, I usually try to have some sort of a concept in my head of an approach or a sound or… you know, I think music should be something alive and free and I don’t think people should just sort of rest on their ??? or at least I don’t like for myself to rest on my ??? and to repeat myself.

Joe Bosso:
Did you record the record at home?

John Frusciante:
Aha.

Joe Bosso:
It’s a ??? it has a very intimate feel of course, but there’s this huge live drum set on that one would get from like a big time studio album?

John Frusciante:
Well, it’s big time studio, you know, I mean it’s not, you know… I think it’s a miss that you need like a fifteen foot ceiling to get a good drum sound, our drum room is pretty small and oddly shaped and it’s got a really live sound and we’ve got amazing drum sound just from the dining room, I don’t think studios are all that, I think it was a really poor misconception that I had for a long time that for something to be a real record you had to do it in a recording studio, ‘cause anybody at home, just by collecting gear piece by piece, you can make things as good sounding as what they do in the studio and especially if you… if you’re doing all the engineering yourself as a musician, the more, the more you play a part in, whatever, the mixing, the ‘micing’, the twiddling of the knobs and stuff, it’s your opportunity to put more and more of your own expression of the music, you know, another words if you play a guitar solo if you’re also pushing the phasers and EQing it and putting different kinds of reverbs on it at different points, it can be an extension of the same feeling that you play it with, whereas when somebody else is doing it in these ??? big studios with highly paid engineers, they don’t know what you’re trying to express, they’re not on the inside of the music, they’re on the outside of it and… so to me the final thing ends up ??? in cases like that. Yeah, I think you can get a good sound anywhere for drums, you know, like MOTOWN where they record all that shit in a tiny little room, you know, it’s… it just doesn’t matter…

Joe Bosso:
Now, I’m a big fan of Johnny Marr but I must say I could not tell at all which track he is playing on, so…can you tell me which track he’s on?

John Frusciante:
He’s on two tracks.

Joe Bosso:
Okay.

John Frusciante:
He’s on “Heaven” and he’s on “Central”.

Joe Bosso:
Okay, okay.

John Frusciante:
Ya, I guess in “Heaven” none of the guitars are me until the second verse, like; he’s basically doing the first verse and the first chorus…

Joe Bosso:
Alrighty.

John Frusciante:
…the first chorus is like a breakdown kinda chorus, if I’m remembering correctly. He basically does the first verse and the first chorus and I do the second verse and the second chorus and the rest of it’s all me. So he’s playing multiple guitars there, you know, he messed around a lot, he basically, you know, we just had one night so…while he was here, touring with Modest Mouse, so we just like, he just heard the songs once and distilled around for a few hours and when we mixed we figured out how to make it, like, working in the structure of the song. That was our approach for all the songs: To kinda record a lot of tracks and figure out in the mix how we were gonna, I mean, I say we, but it was me. But figuring out in the mix like which instruments are gonna be used in which section and doing a lot of tape edit and stuff like that and then…and in the other one, “Central”, he did an acoustic guitar, like, strumming…oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait: Did I say “Heaven”? I meant “Enough Of Me”.

Joe Bosso:
Okay…

John Frusciante:
Yeah, yeah. “Enough Of Me” is the one where he plays on the first verse and the first chorus. He played on “Heaven” but we didn’t use it in the end…just like that.

Joe Bosso:
Okay.

John Frusciante:
But “Enough Of Me”, he’s on the first verse and on the first chorus and on “Central” he plays acoustic, rhythm guitar and he played…

Joe Bosso:
Ya.

John Frusciante:
He did this really neat harmonic thing, a really interesting hand technique, and he had some echo on it and stuff. There might be one other part on “Central” that he plays but I can’t remember…haven’t heard it in a while.

Joe Bosso:
Now, did you give him any kind of direction or did you just…?

John Frusciante:
No, I…that’s the thing…I’ve kinda learned from making records for a long time that if you really wanna capture a good energy on a record it’s best to just…first of all to add only people playing with you who already would have a sense of what you’re doing and are already… sort of, have a soul connection to what you’re doing, you know…

Joe Bosso:
Right.

John Frusciante:
You don’t wanna have somebody just ‘cause they can technically play but, you know, you wanna have somebody who understands your point of view that you write music from, you know, and if you have that, like, the best thing to do is to just let them do whatever they do, you know, like, you know, there’s a little, like, when Josh and I are doing stuff we have a little verbal communication about it but basically, like, he understands my music and knows where it’s coming from so…I like to just let him do whatever he does and then I just figure out during the mix. It’s so easy in the mix. Sometimes when people are too quick to sort of judge something like, “Oh, that doesn’t work right for this section.” or “That’s more…taking over too much.” They’re not using their heads and thinking ahead with how much you can do when you’re mixing, you know, like, with EQ and effects and treatments and stuff you just wrangle it in there, you know…

Joe Bosso:
Yeah.

John Frusciante:
You just, sort of, form it, like, I think, when I was first making records I was too quick to judge things just based on the first listen and I’ve learned over the years that if you got a good energy in the room the spirits of music or, you know, the gods of music do their thing with it, you know, like there’s a plan that’s much more belabored and much more complex and wonderful than anything that you could plan out in your head, you know. If you just let the energies flow, you know…

Joe Bosso:
Now…

John Frusciante:
I don’t change anything with Johnny. I was just watching him come up with stuff, was really educationally, you know, ‘cause I’ve learnt so much from his playing to see that he wasn’t…’cause I come with playing from a…, you know, the theoretical symbols for things are real prominent in my mind and all the time when I make music, even if I’m totally breaking all the rules in playing, atonal notes and all that, I know what intervals they are, you know, when I’m building chord upon chord I know what the intervallic relationship is, you know, and with him…he doesn’t have that…I think he just learnt to play music from doing it and from playing along with old records and stuff…so to see the way that…in his own mind he’s created his own mental symbols for the same things that I use the theoretical symbols for, but, you know, in so many ways I learn how to use things like thirteenths and elevenths and ninths in a musical context from starting from plain to this real complex chord progressions in, like, Smiths songs and stuff like that to find out that he’s always been going by his instinct and going by his own mental pitchers and stuff…it was really neat to watch it just fall into place, you know.

Joe Bosso:
You might be using a bunch of different guitars on the album but if I had to pick a predominant sound it does sound like a Strat most of the time…

John Frusciante:
Yeah, that’s all I’m using. I don’t think I played any other guitars. It’s hard to remember. I might have used an SG on the solo of “Central” but I think I might have just made the Strat sound like an SG with and English Muffin Electro Harmonix Effect. I basically used all the same gear I use in the Chili Peppers, you know, just Marshall Major and Jubilee and my 62 Strat and my 67 Strat…

Joe Bosso:
Right. There’s so many cool sounds on this record but if I had pick one it’s the solo in the song “Enough Of Me”. What…?

John Frusciante:
I think that’s my favorite one too.

Joe Bosso:
There you go. What kind of overdrive are you using on that?

John Frusciante:
I think it’s an English Muffin and I didn’t play that through the Marshalls I played it through a Fender Bassman.

Joe Bosso:
Okay.

John Frusciante:
‘Cause I wanted to get real low frequency……and I wanted to be standing next to the amp and not be too far away from the control room, so…when I was on tour I was just messing around in my hotel room I started to think of that style of playing of…I was just messing around a lot with…instead of thinking of one note as one note that leads to the next note that leads to the next note to sort of divide the guitar into pieces. So you’re playing low notes alternately with high notes that have, you know, a stretch of, you know, a couple of octaves at least and it forces you brain to have to, sort of, thinking two directions at once even though the notes aren’t happening at the same time which…I remember on my first solo album I did a lot of that work. I was playing acoustic guitar parts where they kind of had a bass note and a high note that were at least, like, an octave and a third away from each other or whatever but in this case it’s a single note guitar line but your brain is, sort of, thinking in…up the whole neck…you start to, once you do it for a while, you start to just think of the whole neck as one thing and you don’t stay in those boxy patterns the guitar players can think…

Imrael

Lyrically this record became a concept album and was not initially written that way though I had a clear idea of what sort of things I wanted to write about. I did not write the songs as a character but as myself. The form revealed itself as it took shape and I added songs to complete the flow I perceived. I also left off two songs since the singer’s words were somewhat from the inside out. All the remaining songs lyrical viewpoint is from the inside in. They are very personal, hence my being uncomfortable talking about them in any specific terms. Even in the long “description” I wrote, I’m being very cagey. The actual experience was, and is, very specific and did not involve anything vague. But to explain it in plain terms would serve no purpose other than to make me look insane to people who have no correlating inner experience. What I’ve said so far is vague insomuch as it has to be to be open and universal. But I’ve said enough to where anyone who has had a similar inner experience may be gently directed towards finding some clarity in areas, which are confusing. I’m sharing it to the degree I am because I have, at times, been so lost in the course of my life, and have been gently directed towards making sense of lots of confusing things from reading certain writers and from obsessing on lyrics of rock songs about this same subject, of which I believe there to be many, though perhaps often unbeknownst to the writers of the songs themselves.

We are all reaching up in our own way and so even when we choose concrete things as the object of our desire, I feel that they are only symbols and that the real object of our desire is the creative force inherent in everything. It is what created us and perpetuates our lives, and so our creations are its creations. Kind of like if you built a robot that could think and feel, and then it painted a picture, that picture would be the result of the precise structure of thought and feeling you endowed the robot with. We’re all grateful for what we’ve been given. Even when we are unhappy with everything, its “poor me”, showing that we still think of that “me” and its feelings, as having a lot of significance. It’s a pretty amazing thing to have this complex network of thought and feeling in these bodies. From where does it come? We’ve traced the cause of matter to something that required the preexistence of time, the principles of motion, space and many other things. The laws of motion, time and the space everything exists into, all have an untraced cause. And likewise we don’t have any idea where things like perception and thought came from. So why anything whatsoever exists, whether as actuality or potential, is unknown. I just attribute all these things to the creative force, since, though its essence is unknown, it is in plain view inside each one of us. And it becomes clearer the more generative and positive a persons thoughts and actions are, until it doesn’t seem unknown at all. Our own creative nature is a small version of the creative force we owe existence to, so we can understand that force for ourselves just by doing creative acts.

The life giving properties that the suns rays contain is something we imitate ourselves, whether by smiling at someone or telling a joke, or singing a song. It is a human need when you feel something inside to express it outwardly. And that life giving substance the sun shines out is a lot like our own creative actions. The sun is telling us that if you repeat an action every day (like learning something, playing something or making something), the object of your efforts will grow and grow. Your ability to express yourself or to give to the world around you will grow with your persistence in doing whatever that thing is you do. And even though the sun appears to go up and down, having its process of apparently rising up, peaking, going down, and then hiding, science has taught us that this only appears this way to our point of view and it is circling around, and shining at full strength always. Likewise our own ups and downs just appear as they do to us. In actuality we are thriving all the time. Everything we do is directed towards shining our form of light. We couldn’t do it if we were just peaking all the time, just as life as we know it would end if the sun always stayed at what appears to us as its highest point of strength. A person could never exceed at something if they just did it once in a while, it’s a hint and half that the thing we owe our existence to repeats its rounds every day. Persistence is an incredibly potent thing. We are lucky that life isn’t like dreams, in which the result of our actions is lost by the next dream. Here we have the ability to build a thing from day to day, whether it is skill at something or an actual edifice. Whether in the physical world or in our minds, this principle stands. We read one page of a book, and upon reading the next page its events appear to us as following the last one. In music, one note leads to the next, the new one heard in relationship to the ones, which preceded it. Or we learn the basics of something and then gradually learn that subjects complexities. These gifts are ours to do whatever we want with.

Trying and giving up go hand in hand. But it’s trying that deserves the attention of our will. Giving up is just breathing out. Breathing in is the one we need to remember to do. Breathing out naturally follows. The important thing is just to keep breathing. To try and then just go through all that happens, including not trying. And so we hold our breath sometimes. These things aren’t problems. They are just living. As long as the message you send yourself is that it is important to you to be guided by the creative force inside you, in the long run you are on the same path as the sun. Of course you’ll seem to go up and down, and be in darkness and light. That’s life. The reality of it is that you are a shining star circling through space all the time. So by making your own circular actions (doing some creative or educational activity consistently) you will naturally become more of what you really are. And you are that already. It’s just a game to learn to be it more completely amidst environment, and the illusions of constant change and separateness. One entirety of everything is all there is, ever was, and ever will be.

John Frusciante, January 27th 2009

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