Me and My Friends #39 - A Hot Minute: Factory of Faith
The first song I heard from I'm With You was, as you might expect, "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie." I remember where I was, exactly what I was doing. It was Saturday, July 16, 2011. I used to be a real estate leasing agent, and after a few weeks of teasing, the song surfaced while I was standing out the front of an open house one Saturday morning in the far away suburb of Blacktown. There were no potential tenants. The streets were empty. The suburb is a lot bigger now than it was then. I was staring at my phone, waiting for the half-hour slot to finish so I could go home and actually begin my weekend. In the heat of the moment, I started to play the track, which I think had been accidentally put up on the band's website early, and maybe played on the radio. But for all my excitement, I obviously couldn't hear my first new RHCP song in five years (technically four) over the tinny speaker of an iPhone 3. So I waited until a more appropriate moment, which I'm guessing was the train ride home.
My first thought was a sort of empty hmm... The bass line is undeniably great, and I admired that Josh was taking a very different role as a guitarist to John; that first slingshot note he hits at 0:12 was a lovely arrival. But that chorus, yech. It was no "Dark Necessities." I thought then and I think now that it should not have been the first single, and the song as a whole sounds underdone.
The second song I heard from I'm With You was, as you might expect, "Monarchy of Roses." I don't remember if the album leaked ahead of time; if it did, I didn't listen. Instead I waited, like the good boy I am, for it to stream on iTunes via that short-lived premiere thing they had. And "Monarchy..." is the first song on the album, so obviously that was first up.
I have no memory of any impression I had at the time, but I feel now that it -- and "Maggie" -- are solid 5/10 songs, so I had a few concerns early on. Was this new era of the band going to be, if I may be so frank... any good? Were they finally over the hill? Should they have broken up when John quit?
The third song I heard from I'm With You was "Factory of Faith." This, finally, was the song that sent a calming wave of relief through all 96,000 km of my veins, the song that made me realise it was all going to be okay. I love the song. But I really love the outro.
The song itself is a lot of fun, and to my ears would have been a good candidate for first single. (But, if I'm pressed, I think that should have been "Did I Let You Know," as long as Anthony was able to sing it at all those early promo shows.) Regardless of what some people might think or say, the RHCP have always been about Flea and Anthony, and the opening bars of the song are all about them. That bass is unmistakably Flea, and Anthony sounds great ("I was fishing for a hook?" I mean... come on), and while Chad sounds a little robotic, that's kinda the point, and the electronic drums that supplement him are a great touch. The chorus is anthemic and would sound great coming out of a tiny radio in the summertime, Josh does this wonderful thing where he doubles Flea's bass in the verse, and the bridge has those bum-bum-backup vocals from what I think might be Flea, which is a rarity in itself.
No notes. Delightful.
Catchy, upbeat, only a few embarrassing lyrics (I could do without the "we should mate" bits) -- why wasn't it highlighted more? Why was it not a single, when "Monarchy of Roses" was? I think the band themselves are actually quite fond of it. It's the only I'm with You song other than "Rain Dance Maggie" that made it all the way up to 2019.
Back in 2011, I remember enjoying "Factory of Faith" as it played that first time, in my childhood bedroom that I was about to move out of, and so this whole era probably holds a strange amount of significance to me and only me that I need to work through on my own time. But it started to really click as the final chorus ended and the band let the song breathe a little bit. Anthony recedes into the background and does his little adlibs, Flea slides back into his wonderful verse line, and Josh and Chad (and Mauro and Lenny) really get into something deep.
It's business as usual from 3:23 to 3:37, but then it kicks into a higher gear. Josh does these wah-soaked stabs, and at 3:51 he opens the pedal. At the exact same time the electronic hi-hats explode, and all of a sudden, I remember thinking: hang on -- this doesn't sound like the Chili Peppers.
That is not a bad thing. That is a wonderful thing.
I'm not 100% on this, but I think the original base track of the song was done to a click (in order for the overdubbed drum machines to eventually work), because Flea and Chad are very rigid sounding in this outro. It suits the song, so there's no problem, but it's an interesting look for a band with a history that was so strictly intent in the past on recording live. The days of "Organic Anti Beat Box Band" were very long gone. From memory only "The Zephyr Song" and maybe "Higher Ground" were recorded to click tracks previously. You can almost hear Flea struggle against it in his ears as the natural ebb and flow of his playing tries to take over.
At 3:51 the song takes a higher gear, but it's not done, because four bars later at 4:04, it goes a step further. It's just Josh overdubbing another guitar line an octave up, but it's an exciting addition to a song about to finish. Just when you think you're done, there's another level.
If this song was on Stadium Arcadium, it would have ended with an enormous guitar solo, which would have been, you know, great. But we'd heard 37 versions of that in 2006.
But it's on I'm With You, so it ends with a focus on the bass, and a LOT of percussion, and with some understated guitar. It's almost a techno song in that outro. My impression at the time was that it sounded a lot like an LCD Soundsystem song, which is notable in a sense because just a year earlier that very band recorded an album at The Mansion. To me this showed a whole lot of growth, and relieved me a great deal.
I was worried that the Josh-era iteration of the RHCP wasn't going to be any good. Let's be honest, we were all worried. No need to sugarcoat it. What delighted me was that they didn't just get a John 2.0 and record a bunch of songs that sounded like stuff he would do. It occurred to me as I wrote this that those first two songs I heard from the album, "Rain Dance Maggie" and "Monarchy of Roses," were also very different sounding songs for the band, and I didn't like them.
It didn't always work, but sometimes it really, really, really did. "Factory of Faith" is one of those times. And I'm a big fan of that final minute of the song. I'm glad we got to hear it.
I wrote this before the band released that snippet of the new song. Weird how things work out like that. The next time you hear from me, we'll have heard a new Red Hot Chili Peppers song! How's that for wild?
H