Chili Peppers Release New Single, Gear Up For Album

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Red Hot Chili Peppers' new album in stores May 9th

By Ian Rice
Arts and Lifestyle Editor


Renown funk rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers released a new single and video last week, providing the first glimpse into their forthcoming double album, Arcadium Stadium. The song, entitled "Dani California," is classic Chili Peppers and helps confirm the band's own suggestion that the double album (due May 9th) is their best effort yet.


Arcadium began as a simple project, with the band proposing thirteen or fourteen simple tracks to form, as frontman Anthony Kiedis told Rolling Stone magazine, "a small, digestable piece of art." But after the writing process, thirteen songs turned into a whopping thirty-eight. After the suggestion to make three separate-but-related albums with all the material was rejected, the band settled on a double album settling in at around twenty-five tracks. But the whittling down process was far from easy. "A lot of (the songs)," guitarist John Frusciante detailed in Rolling Stone magazine, "I could easily give the argument 'This won't make the album any worse. It'll make it better.'"


While the length of Arcadium Stadium might seem overwhelming to some music buyers, it must be noted that there are no conceptual threads or complicated stories contained on the record as there usually is with this type of project. Instead, it is just the standard Chili Peppers themes of love, loss and human understand. Oh, and a few mentions of their home state of California as well.


As excited as they are about the material included on Arcadium, the band is even more excited about performing the songs in concert. "We wrote 'em, we've listened to them," Anthony Kiedis mentioned in Rolling Stone magazine, "But we haven't given them a life onstage. We're going to do that for the next year."


And indeed they will. The Chili Peppers already have a wealth of European dates book for this coming summer, with a US tour leg undoubtedly around the corner.