Me and My Friends #62 - I'm Beside You
I’M BESIDE YOU, or “I love my mistakes/I’ve been here before.”
I had a worrying initial impression with I'm with You, mostly because of the band’s choice of lead single. There was always going to be a concern that moving Josh into the band wasn’t going to work out, that John was going to be not just missed but sorely missed, and the first taste of music we heard didn’t do much to help temper those concerns. But “Maggie” aside - I mean, come on, great verse, dreadful chorus - I grew to love pretty much the whole album very quickly. John’s absence was undeniable, yes, but his absence was a great thing, looking back. You experiment by removing, or altering elements. Take a component out of the band and slot another one in, and what changes? Lots, really, in ways both obvious from the outset and in others that took a year or two (or ten) to make themselves known. The idea that this band has been going for so long and has so many versions of itself is the best thing about it; that I got to witness the Klinghoffer decade in real time is something I cherish.
Twelve years later, I still love the album and would change very little about it (though I would pay good, good, good money to have the cover officially and permanently changed to literally anything else, it’s by far the band’s worst album cover and I have no idea what they were thinking). There’s very little I dislike about it (apart from that cover, just inexcusably bad, I mean - what were they thinking).
The Chili Peppers did some great things between 2009 and 2019 and explored creative avenues that I actually prefer to bits of their more recent work. It wasn't all perfect, but it happened, and for that I'm happy. Whether I like I’m with You more than The Getaway is something I'll probably never get to the bottom of; thankfully each album sounds so wildly different from the other that they occupy two different ends of one Josh-shaped spectrum.
But we’re not here for that album. Rather, its strange little companion. The lesser known one, the occasionally more beloved one, the less mainstream of the two. The RFK to the JFK. One of the best things about the I'm with You era was the steady stream of bonus music put out during it. Prior to 2011, this band always had a knack for saving some of their best work for the cutting room floor, to be released on the odd-CD single or import edition. And as the album approached there wasn’t anything to suggest that this wasn’t going to be the case again.
But then… nothing. Three singles were released, and none of them had any bonus music. By this point, CD singles were basically radio-only promos, and of the few that were put out commercially, none of them had bonus tracks; there wasn’t even a Japanese bonus track on the album. The band's recent willingness to acknowledge and release Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen's extras on streaming services is a delight, but back in 2011, and into 2012, the only B-side we actually got was a random live version of "Goodbye Hooray" on one European version of the Brendan's Death Song CD single – and how many copies of that even existed? Eleven? It seemed as if we were going to have to go without.
But it turns out album singles weren't necessary anyway; the band had other plans, plans that led us, in the end, to where we are today. After the odd tweet and tease, on August 14, 2012, almost exactly a year after I'm with You, "Strange Man" b/w "Long Progression" emerged from the vaults and there was, as Anthony put it, a "storm of seven inches" - seventeen tracks total, conveniently but perhaps intentionally the same amount of songs on Blood Sugar (hell the whole set is even almost the same exact length as Blood Sugar) - released in the months and years afterwards.
Rather than relegate these extra songs to an import-only CD single that would likely be out of print in a matter of weeks, doomed to appear from then on in an endless cycle of overpriced eBay auctions, each double A-side single was given its own release digitally and physically (still doomed to appear in endless eBay auctions, but not much you can do about that!). They were referred to as “tracks from the I’m with You sessions” at the time, and were tied off nicely in November 2013 with the unexpected compilation release given the clever (but let's be honest, technically incorrect) name of I’m Beside You.
I’m a staunch believer that something being released is never a negative thing when the alternative is it being kept it in the vault, especially when a band’s status as legendary was cemented years ago. I’ll always take more over less. Gimme, gimme… and this last part is important, gimme. Essentially, we were to be given an entire second album’s worth of music from the sessions, a few songs at a time, and then in one final scooped up collection. A perfect plan with no downsides.
Then those songs started to come out. Though I quite liked the initial singles - "Never is a Long Time" is a top 10 song by the band for me, sometimes top 5 - by early 2013, I had pretty much lost track of the whole project. You can essentially cut it right down the middle. The first half of these were events, moments of excitement that I spent weeks looking forward to, the way I looked forward to the album proper a year earlier in 2011. Two new songs every month or so was such a treat, a perfect way to digest them for a little while before moving on to the next ones. I was primed for their emergence into the RHCP canon. I would listen to them before work, after work, during work. I have distinct and pleasant memories (well, they’re pleasant now) of doing a job I hated but escaping from it by listening to these songs over and over; I even started to think of a music video for “Never is a Long Time,” which is how my brain tells me it really likes something. It was during this period, I think, that I actually first started forming the first, barebones, baby-steps RHCP Sessions website. So, you know, good memories.
The second half of the deluge from these sessions were things I remembered I had to buy a few days after they came out. I just pressed a button on the iTunes store, mostly out of loyalty to the band, but never with a real passion, and my memory of first listens, of where I was standing, what I was doing, what I was thinking as I heard these new entries for the first time is completely gone.
Sure, yes, maybe their release coincided with a period of my life in which I didn't listen to the band as much. At that point I’d moved away from them in some respects (this has obviously reversed in the years since). But at the time I couldn't tell if it was just my waning desire to listen to the Chili Peppers - perhaps that teenagerhood obsession was done with, that website I had started destined to be left behind semi-abandoned - or a genuine reflection on the quality of these bonus songs, what we know now as I’m Beside You. The ones I enjoyed at the time I still enjoy; the ones I’m tepid towards I’m still fairly tepid towards. Maybe this kind of prolonged drip feed of a certain sound, a certain snapshot of a band at a certain point in time, makes you tire of it?
Even the band (or Warner Bros.) seemed to want to get the whole thing over with after a while. The first half-dozen were given a fair amount of attention; this was a curiosity and it was treated as such. But the last three singles were put out all at once to virtually zero fanfare. “Agh,” I could practically hear, “enough already. Just get it out.”
For whatever reason: after a while, the magic wore off. The final five or six songs - from “Catch my Death” onwards, let’s say - I truly couldn't tell apart when they were released; they seemed to have this throwaway quality, a feeling that if the Chili Peppers didn’t want them out back in August 2011, nor did they insist on getting them to the front of the line throughout 2012, how good could they really be? Would they really be saving their best work, or even good work, for these last, unwanted releases that they quietly dumped out all at once?
I did try to listen, but nothing ever took hold, not in the way other music of theirs did. Perhaps it was the relentless nature of them. Perhaps it really was just the quality of the music. Perhaps it was just something going on in my brain during that period. Every full-scale release of the band sits within the context of its time perfectly, every new entry in the band’s career is its own distinct chapter. But this one never quite did anything for me. It came and went, lost in the jumble between everything else.
(I’m aware that I’m probably in the minority in thinking this, that plenty of people have adored all of these songs from day one.)
But the band continued on, put I’m Beside You out - I even bought it! It must have cost me like 90 dollars! - and made more music, and fired and rehired members, and the years have been extremely kind to the project. My passion for the band has obviously been rekindled, but these songs have remained a bit of a blind spot.
Since 2013, I've often felt conflicted about the collection of tracks we've come to know as I'm Beside You.
But I’ve also long thought that it was time to reconsider that.
That’s what this letter is. I could have simply put this out as a dot point, thousand-word review, a few paragraphs about what I thought was good and what was not so good about this specific set of songs, and moved on.
But there's something bigger tied into all of this, which, I think, is that the presentation and placement of a song matters immensely. It creates a narrative in your head that colours every subsequent consideration and/or listen of the song, especially if it’s something that you go into a listen “knowing” about ahead of time.
When a band leave a song off a record, there's an unspoken feeling - at least at first, a kind of kneejerk thing - that it isn't as good as the stuff that actually made the proper record. That they’re leftovers. After all, why didn't they put it out into the world, give it the proper attention, when they had the chance? Chili Peppers albums are democratically selected, each band member (and Rick) get a vote. If the band had thought "Whatever We Want" should have been on Stadium Arcadium, it would have been so. But clearly as a whole they didn’t feel too warmly about it. Even if certain members may have loved it, the votes didn’t add up, and so in the end it was left off. Literally left over.
And having purchased the Dani California single some time in April or May of 2006, when I heard "Whatever We Want" for the first time, I thought: yep, this is a B-Side. I still agree, every time I hear it, that it shouldn't have made the album, and that they made the right choice in leaving it out (the chorus is a dud, and something about that guitar tone makes it feel so wimpy, John seemed to have such trouble recording “heavy-metal” style songs like that during that period). There are countless other Chili Peppers b-sides that I feel that way about; the two Japanese bonus tracks from 2022 are recent examples. And don’t get me started on other bands!
But the opposite can also cloud further listening. When I heard "Quixoticelixir" for the first time, it was like I'd missed out on some in-joke. This is not a B-side. (I felt the same way about another song on the Dani California single, “Lately.” That really should have made the album.) After the dust had settled when those 2006 bonus tracks were first released, I wanted to grab each band member by the lapel, and Rick Rubin and each employee of Q Prime, and Mo Ostin for good measure, and chastise them publicly for this smooth-brained, low-IQ decision. Not only do I think "Quixoticelixir" should have been on Californication, I think it should have been a single (though I'd change the name to "Perfect Storm" or "Love this Weather" or something a ten year old can spell and pronounce).
And so now, every time I hear the song, a small part of me still wonders why the hell it never made the album. Maybe Anthony couldn’t reliably sing it live, but that hasn’t stopped them before. He referred to it as a “dense” song in Scar Tissue but also said he had high hopes for it, and was disappointed that it didn’t make it. Did the rest of the band feel uninspired by it? Flea vetoed “Bunker Hill” because he didn’t like his bass playing (another smooth-brained, low-IQ decision); did something similar happen here? When I hear John's guitar solo at the end, I wonder if the fact that it was recorded directly into the board is because it was a draft, an early take, something they’d intended on re-doing later; that it never was is because it was… never re-done. The song doesn’t seem to have been mixed along with the rest of the album; it’s a little dryer, a little bare sounding, like it’s missing an overdub or two, a proper fleshing out, proper gating on the snares, etc., etc. If it had been, it would gel a little more. They must have known early on that it was never making the album and that’s why it's got a slightly less-finished quality.
There was a fan vote recently on the band’s Sirius XM channel, picking their best ever songs, and “Quixoticelixir” was #35. And yet from almost the beginning of the song’s existence, it was being forgotten. It never made it onto a Californication single, or even a Greatest Hits single, like “Bunker Hill,” and was kept away from hungry ears for almost a decade. Its exclusion has become a part of the song's DNA. It’s why you think about it a certain way. I’d be having thoughts along the same lines if, say, “Easily” or “This Velvet Glove” were left off Californication, and only appeared as b-sides.
It’s all a matter of personal opinion, of course. Some out there love “Whatever We Want” and can’t stand “Quixoticelixir.” But you get my drift; they’d just feel this exact same way about a different set of songs. Hell, I haven’t even mentioned “Kaly” yet!
You can go even deeper into all of this. Start thinking about alternate realities. Let’s move an album on: “Body of Water” is one of my favourite Chili Peppers tracks hands down, and yet it never made By the Way; again it’s been relegated to an out-of-print CD single forever, criminally not even available on streaming. But it’s a sludgy, deep, shoegazy track that stylistically doesn’t really fit on the album that’s full of brighter, poppier numbers anyway, so of course they decided to leave it off.
But - what if it was on the album? You might get the occasional comment that it sticks out, that it doesn’t match the vibe of the rest of the songs. But if “Don’t Forget Me” can be on the same album as “On Mercury,” couldn’t a sludgy rocker like “Body of Water”? It wouldn’t be abnormal if we’d have lived with it for the past twenty-two years.
So in essence, I can reverse everything I just said. When I heard “Whatever We Want” for the first time, I knew why it had been cast aside. But if it hadn’t been, if it made the album, I’d just think of it as one of the tracks I don’t care for as much, and then go on with my life. But those decisions, what gets given proper attention, what gets left behind, it adds to the song’s backstory, even if it’s a story for one person to consider.
The band will be the first to tell you that a song not being on an album doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t like it. They’ll insist that they’re not lesser songs, that some of them are actually their favourites. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean what I said isn’t true either.
It's not just whether a song made an album or not. The decision to make a track an opener, or a closer, or a single, a certain mix choice: if a song as it originally exists is a bucket of pure white paint, these are all little drops, changing its colour, for better or worse. Sometimes you end up with blue paint, and that’s fine, but sometimes you have to wonder if it would have been better staying white, or another colour entirely.
What has this got to do with I’m Beside You? Well, I fear that how these songs were released clouded my perspective of the entire body of work. Their entire identity is caught up in the idea that they were separately released. Leftovers feel like leftovers sometimes, and what happens to them seems obvious some of the time.
But not all the time; for every “Whatever We Want,” there’s a “Quixoticelixir,” and sometimes that can be hard to get your head around. This collection has seventeen different backstories, an overarching narrative, and a place in the band’s history all at the same time.
There’s one tangent I need to go on first: I'm Beside You is not an album. At least it’s not an “album.” If you were to line all of the band's releases up, from their debut, all the way to Return of the Dream Canteen, you couldn’t reasonably compare it on the same level as One Hot Minute or Freaky Styley, or any of their other mainline, official, sanctioned releases.
I can see why it’s tempting to do so. For one thing, it’s easy to do. It’s a set of songs with clear margins, it has its own name, its own cover, it’s the length of an album. If you’ve set it up correctly it’s just as accessible in whatever music listening program you use as any other proper album.
But is it an album? Well… The band put each song out as coinciding digital singles and 7" releases, and then collected all seventeen tracks as a limited edition compilation – I’m Beside You – which has been out of print for about eleven years. Apparently, they only made 5000 copies of the LP compilation (#3126 sits behind me as I type this), and the singles probably far less so for each edition. Digital copies are infinite, of course, but I’m Beside You cannot be purchased as a single entity; only the singles can be. And who even buys digital tracks anymore when streaming is so pervasive?
You can't walk into a store on your lunch break and buy I'm Beside You, unless you're buying a second hand copy of that one-off release from 2013 (the average price on Discogs is about $200). Half the tracks were put out on an Australian-only version of I’m with You in 2013, but that doesn’t help anyone. You can't stream the album I'm Beside You on the band's Apple Music or Spotify page; the only way to do so is link up all the singles and make your own playlist or custom album. That’s a rule I’ve decided I go by in the course of writing this paragraph: if you have to make it yourself, it’s not a real thing. If you have to will it into existence, it can’t possibly occupy the same space as the others.
I’m Beside You is a compilation. To put it, as a collection of work, up against I'm with You or any other genuine Chili Peppers release is an obvious comparison - I mean, good luck not comparing it to I’m with You, but it’s not quite a fair comparison, because it only became itself once the whole thing was done. It wasn't sequenced as an album; it was sequenced chronologically (though one can easily wonder if the chronological order was intentional in a certain way). It was mixed in fits and starts. Some songs clearly only just missed being on I'm with You; some weren't finished until 2013, pretty much by Josh and Josh alone, almost two full years after the rest of the album was finished. It would be the same deal if they had compiled all those Stadium Arcadium-era b-sides and released it as Venus in late 2007, sequencing it by release date. It’s like saying you like What Hits?! better than Freaky Styley. If that’s okay, then I guess my favourite Chili Peppers album is The Studio Album Collection 1991 - 2011.
Over the decade since its release we, collectively, as fans, have just occasionally decided that it can be its own thing, that it's the secret eleventh album between I’m with You and The Getaway. That it should or could be judged as a singular work of art, conceived of with a beginning and an end, and not just a handy collection of a bunch of extra songs that came out over a twelve-month period. It's almost like people saying a collection of deleted scenes is comparable to the movie they were deleted from.
Really, the closest comparison one can make is to Return of the Dream Canteen, but even here there’s a clear difference. An album’s worth of additional material released shortly after the initial album. They were both given unique artwork, their own name, but the similarities end there. One is an album, and the other isn’t. One you can buy in a store today, one you can’t. In fact, I dare say the way they released these songs was present in the band’s mind ten years later; it’s why Return of the Dream Canteen got a proper release, they didn't want those songs forgotten as well.
So I’m Beside You, or the collection of tracks also known as “I’m with You Sessions” is not an album, and we shouldn't think of it as such, because I’m not sure if that’s technically fair. Really, it's a gift. Something the band gave us that they didn't need to, and with the lack of CD singles, seemed to actually go out of their way to provide. It probably made a profit, sure, otherwise Warner Bros. wouldn’t have greenlit the project at all, but it was a labour of love essentially put together by Josh.
Now, the singles are all out of print, they were never really played live except for the odd tease, and with John back there's no mention of any of them, or the compilation, on the band's website or retrospectives on their social media pages. If it wasn't for the individual singles’ availability on streaming services, it'd be like they never existed in the first place. The way they treat the Josh era is bad enough; how they treat this whole other album’s worth of music is even worse. It’s like the Dave era, and the Josh era, were outliers, and everything else is the band reverting to the mean.
And so I can guarantee you that a large portion of the band's fanbase, the more casual fans (i.e., people who don't subscribe to this newsletter) will have no idea this exists. If they do, it's because they've scrolled down past By the Way and Unlimited Love on the band's Apple Music or Spotify page and gotten into the weeds of the single releases that are up there; another album or two is going to push those down even further, another few years of the band pretending they never existed is only going to make it so that less and less people know about them.
When they first started to be released, Chad had said “We just wanted them to come out because we just really like them. We didn’t want them to get lost.”
They’re not lost. They’re not “Bunker Hill” or “Trouble in the Pub.” But they are hard to find. They're a secret in a video game; a pickup behind a hidden door that plenty of people know about, but most will have to be told is there. Something discovered on the second (or third) level of your fandom, once the main tent poles are out of the way and dealt with and you start getting into the weeds, discovering the songs that aren’t celebrated the same amount as the rest. The types of songs you only stumble over, and then wonder where they fit into the big picture.
That’s the next idea that this project has made me think about; how we as fans - and not just Chili Peppers fans but music fans in general - tend to elevate “b-sides” (I’ll use that as a catch-all term) into this strange mythical status, especially when they’re, well, good. Because something wasn’t a single, wasn’t on the album, it’s got more cachet for some reason. You think about it less because it’s less prevalent, and then when it does come to your attention, that hidden nature of it changes how you feel about it. We become besotted with something we’re less familiar with. Some fans probably even consider them their own special secret, something that they’d prefer to be hidden away, because it’s something that’s more “theirs.”
There are countless songs out there that have taken on this status within other band communities; “Acquiesce” by Oasis, “Rain” by the Beatles, “Talk Show Host” by Radiohead. To use a random smattering of Reddit comments, check out this thread (why try to describe something when I can let a hundred random people do so better than I ever could.) Yes, sometimes it's because these songs show a side of a band that isn't present elsewhere, but "Acquiesce" is a run of the mill Oasis song. People just like it because they've heard it less.
I too am guilty of this, I’m sure. And people are guilty of doing it for this compilation.
Countless Reddit threads pit I’m with You against I’m Beside You. It gets included in those tier lists people make. People say that they like I’m Beside You more than anything else the band have put out, or at least better than anything else the band did with Josh. Here’s just one of many, many examples; the main text and the comments are wildly illuminating.
I would read comments like that in genuine puzzlement, because my memory - what little I had - of these songs was so completely different than the people who sang their praises so loudly.
I should just be happy that they exist, that they can be heard at all (which I am).
I don’t think it’s an album, though.
However. Album or no album. Preconceived notions or not. Are these seventeen songs any good? Before I started drafting this letter, I would have told you that from the seventeen of them on the set, I truly loved one ("Never is a Long Time"), really liked two ("Your Eyes Girl" and "Strange Man"), appreciated three in a kind of I wish you were better for whatever reason way (“Victorian Machinery,” “In Love Dying" and "Long Progression"), and felt a range between moderate, easily-forgettable and hard to describe like for some, and outright derision for the rest.
But for the past few months I've been rinsing these tracks. I tried to forget that I had ever heard them in the first place, if that was even possible. I tried to both think about them and listen to them. I listened to them in “order” (i.e. release order) and then on random shuffle. I listened to them carefully, thinking about every aspect of each song, holistically and atomistically, thinking what was going through Flea’s mind when he played one specific note, and then what was going through the entire band’s minds as they collectively carved a new song out of thin air. Listening to them in the background, leaving the space for minutes at a time while my computer played to an empty room, letting them be part of the background noise of life. And I listened to them carefully, just me and a train window.
Part of me simply wished I had a clearer idea of these songs, and maybe that’s the whole reason I did it; they're part of the Chili Peppers canon and I hadn't really given most of them the proper time of day, the same chance to shine, the same attention I’d given the rest of their catalogue, which I know inside out, have heard so many times I can pretty much cue them up in my brain and let them play. Before this project started I think I had heard “Hometown Gypsy” maybe five full times. That’s no good. I needed to fix that.
It’s a journey of sitting with something because you love the band, but not necessarily the music, or at least not yet. Because they have given me so much - what, agency? permission to expel some of my weird manic energies? - I thought I should give something back. I love the band, obviously, and spend far too much time thinking about them in a million different ways. But even I have blindspots; this collection was it for me.
I also tried to think about why they were left behind, for whatever reason. I tried to think about what it would feel/sound/be like if they were on the album, the “proper” album the whole time. On one hand, they should be indistinguishable from the songs that made the album, but on the other a lot of time had passed, and these things aren’t made in a vacuum. Something mixed a year after the rest is going to sound different no matter what.
The idea was that I would see how my perspective changed before the project started and afterwards. Was there hidden gold here, or was my original opinion fair, and these really are mostly middling leftovers? I couldn’t tell “Catch my Death” and “Brave from Afar” apart when they first came out, how about once they’ve spent a month on repeat? I tried to be open minded, but if something wasn’t any good, I tried not to shy away from that thought.
Cut to a few months later. Where did I end up?
Firstly, it was a fool’s errand to think I could just listen to these for a few months, come up with a settled opinion, and then move on. My opinion on these songs, like my opinion on every song ever, fluctuates every day. It fluctuates several times a day. Mood, method of delivery, what you heard before or afterwards, it changes everything. I mean this in the best way possible, but I think the Chili Peppers are the best band in the world to have two beers to, so of course I tried that method too. I don’t have a final, concrete opinion, just about nine hundred nebulous thoughts. In that sense it's like any other album.
My main one is that this band is far more experimental than they’re given credit for. You and I both know that they’re so much more than the slap bass Californiadingdong guys. But it’s remarkable to see that fact all put in one place; they hide that experimentation away from the general public, i.e. on harder to find compilations like this, on out-of-print CD singles, in vaults, where they only leak out by chance. This might be because they’re concerned about their commercial performance. They know pop-driven stuff, stuff that is instilled with Chili Peppers DNA, sells more, is more palatable to concert crowds, will get on the radio, etc. I don’t think that they take zero risks, but they certainly take fewer risks than they could. These songs are the band that exists away from radios.
There’s nothing in this collection that fits the “typical” RHCP DNA. There’s a type of song that the band could write in their sleep; it appeared a fair bit towards the end of the Stadium Arcadium era: a funky bass part, a sparse verse line from John, a very melodic chorus, bridge, solo, end. Things like “Mercy Mercy.” Very little from the Josh era is like this; I have a feeling that John and Flea being able to write these types of songs so easily together had a big part in him coming back, look how quickly songs like “Peace and Love” and “Tippa My Tongue” re-emerged. These Josh-era songs might have been harder to write, came about less fluidly, but quite often the results are far more interesting than their other castoffs, and now they’re a sound the band don’t gravitate towards that much.
We have some of the band’s heaviest songs, a kraut-rock-esque meditative workout that is one of their longest songs ever, piano-driven pop, Rolling Stones impressions, krautrock impressions, the precursor to sounds explored a decade later, a jagged-edge funk-metal workout with a spoken word verse and a children’s choir coda. And more. It’s the band wearing seventeen different hats.
It’s not all good - for all my talk that where a song is placed shouldn’t affect how you feel about it, there’s no way I can hear “Brave from Afar” next to “Brendan’s Death Song” and not know which one was destined for obscurity. Some of their work on this feels uninspired, a little paint-for-numbers. And while it’s full of experimentation, not all of those experiments work.
But they’re earworms, every one of them. Maybe this is Stockholm syndrome, but even the songs I don’t love I found myself warming to. I’ve never had a song stuck in my head so consistently like I have for this set of them, over the course of a few months. So many of these I started, I went “ugh, this one?” and by the end I was nodding my head along with it.
As they were announced, Josh said this about the upcoming release of the first batch of tracks:
Finding songs that seem to want to join hands with others is a special task that require the right people...and the right songs! Some songs seem to have a lot more of an agenda than others. Some songs play well with others and some songs need more attention and a little extra care. Here are some songs that seemed to want to pair up and take a later train. Keep your eye on them, they're up to something…
Knowing Josh a little better, I detect a bit of sarcasm and, dare I say it, bitterness in there. These songs feel like his babies; his work is all over them, perhaps more so than the album proper. He even had “Never is a Long Time” on his custom hoodie that he wore all throughout 2011 and 2012; he was wearing that before we even knew the song existed. He was the one who returned to these songs over and over, working on them probably by himself towards the middle of 2013.
One thing that’s become apparent with Josh’s contributions is that he seems to have had moments of self-consciousness about being too similar to John. Part of this would have been a natural thing - he is a different person after all. But I think some of it was intentional. When he joined the band he was required to fill John’s shoes in virtually every way; a Strat-playing lead guitarist who also contributed backing vocals from the higher end of his register. He played John’s songs and stood on John’s side of the stage. Hell, he was already John’s protege. People turning up between 2011 and 2019 who had no real idea about the band’s history would think he was the one who wrote all those songs (even if he did seem awfully young.)
Occasionally he seemed to fight against this, try to be a different type of guitarist, singer, and musician (in that sense he ended up being more like Dave Navarro.) The fact I’m still comparing him to John is probably exactly why he did so, but these comparisons are essentially impossible to avoid, especially now that John is back in the fold. This is evident in a couple of ways on I’m Beside You.
One of them was by not falling back on traditional, flashy, blues inspired, perhaps wah-infused solos. He’s obviously capable of doing so. But that was John’s thing. In this collection we have several songs which have room for traditional, flashy, blues inspired, perhaps wah-infused solos, and he goes the other way with it. He seemed to prefer texture over anything else. “Long Progression” is one. I like what Josh did with it but can also picture what John would have; you can’t help but wonder. The solo on “This is the Kitt” sounds like it’s from a Queen of the Stone Age record (which is a good thing, if that’s not clear). An album later, think about the solo on “Detroit.” Kind of a gutsy move to do a solo like that on a Chili Peppers album. Sometimes they seemed more intentional decisions than natural arrivals.
Another is with his vocals. I think Josh has a great voice and I wish he wouldn’t hide it away - do that mouth-full-of-marbles effect - so frequently. When he does let it out (i.e. as John does) it really soars and actually suits Anthony’s really well. He rarely layered it like a girl-group in a three part harmony like his predecessor did, but there’s a lovely quality to them that absolutely fits in the Chili Peppers mould.
“Magpies on Fire” is a prime example. In the beginning verses of the song you can hear Josh do something he fell back on quite a lot, a kind of ethereal moan that sits along with the lead vocals. He uses his mouth like a synth. But to me, it almost sounds like this is the first time Josh has ever heard the song and he’s just kinda… humming along with it? He does the same thing in “Long Progression,” “The Sunset Sleeps,” and “Brave from Afar.” It feels like a placeholder, which to me makes the song feel like a leftover, like he never got to go back to finish it, like the draft of a guitar solo in “Quixoticelixir.” In “Magpies,” he does kick in fully with the “spins a yarn…” line and puts his whole voice into it; fantastic! Both sides of a feeling are present in the same song, but I can’t help shake that feeling that the ethereal moan is something holding the song back.
Speaking of vocals, we need to discuss Anthony’s. Lyrically, the I’m with You-era is up there amongst his best work. Things like “Brendan’s Death Song” are the most profound thing he’s written, maybe ever, and the quality of his vocals are excellent too; the only prominent moment of blatant autotune I can detect is a particularly bad warble during “Victorian Machinery.” Everly coming into his life really seemed to open up a whole new avenue of things to write about, and as far as actual cringle levels go, I think this album has potentially the least out of all of them, “I like you cheeky, so Mozambiquey” aside.
But then there’s the heys. Or more specifically, the heyyyyys. Throughout this era, for whatever reason - perhaps something he learned from a new vocal coach, perhaps it just happened naturally, perhaps he wasn't even aware it was happening - his vocals were infected with these nasally, stretched out vowel sounds. It’s exclusive to this era and hasn’t really come back, so I think it was the result of a new singing technique. The chorus of “Rain Dance Maggie.” The verses in “Hanalei.” The chorus in “Hometown Gypsy.” The pre-chorus bit of “Pink as Floyd.” The back-end of “Meet Me at the Corner.” Almost the entirety of “Brave from Afar.” The mixing doesn’t help; the jacked-up EQ and heavy compression turns his voice chipmunky after a while; the extended “to investigate your fate,” in “Pink as Floyd” is just plain shrill after a while. It would probably sound better if he sung from the bottom of his chest more, like he does at the end of “Pink as Floyd.” But he’s the world famous lead singer and knows more than I do.
“Hanalei” is another iffy example. It just turns up out of nowhere - like he was trying to extend the words he had already written and couldn’t be bothered writing any more. He just sings “hey, yeah,” instead. Which is a surprise to me; he never had trouble coming up with a bit of filler in the past. Writing that stuff is his specialty.
Several albums have some sort of vocal tic or quality from Anthony. On Uplift Mofo his voice is completely shot, especially on “Love Trilogy.” During the By the Way era he used the phrase “come again” about seventeen different times. Recently whatever autotune they’ve been using has made it sound like he’s singing with a frog in his throat. They’re all things that I’ve come to recognize and even celebrate, for better or worse.
But for a long time, when I heard these songs, I thought about those vocal sounds, and couldn’t really move past it. When these songs got stuck in my head it was really a particular tone of Anthony’s singing that got stuck in there. Now that tone is shorthand for the entire collection, the entire era.
As for the other members of the band, there’s less to say. Chad is reliably excellent no matter what, and the engineering of his drums during these sessions is fantastic. “Your Eyes Girl” is, I think, the only time he says actual words (and what wonderful words they are) on a Chili Peppers record, which is something to be celebrated. His ability to go from heavy rock to slinky pop to a back-country shuffle in the space of a couple of songs… I mean, you don’t need me to tell you how good Chad is. He’s Chad Smith. No notes.
Flea’s presence seems a little diminished. There isn’t much of him on this collection, and I would take a guess and say most of the songs he brought into the studio that were fleshed out ended up on I’m with You; he seems to have gotten his way and gotten his songs to the front of the line. “In Love Dying” is excellent, one of his greatest moments, but I feel him the least on this collection than I have since By the Way. It’s Josh’s baby through and through. Your mileage may vary.
I’ve spent a long time wrestling with a question, something along the lines of: “Why did they record/mix/overdub this when they knew it was never going to make the album?” I’m not entirely sure how fair this is, but I’d bet that “In Love Dying” was never going to make it, and I think “The Sunset Sleeps” and “Hometown Gypsy” never would have either. Albums are long, arduous endeavours. Tape and studio time is expensive. The Chili Peppers are worth a lot of money to a lot of people and need to recoup the investments people have made in them. At one point, during the third or fourth take of “Hometown Gypsy,” did they not think for a second that maybe they should have spent their time elsewhere, on a song that was definitely going to actually make the album that they were there to make? Josh lamented that because the band had so many songs, some of them didn’t get the attention they required. Maybe they shouldn’t have recorded so many!
Then again, maybe they don’t think about that kind of thing until the album’s done, until it’s time to do final mixes of everything. They don’t make music just to put it on an album and sell it, I know that. It’s a sacred, creative, insular process. And songs like “Californication” wouldn’t exist if the band decided that they were “done” at an arbitrary point. But maybe they’d prefer it themselves if they drew a line under everything at 20, 25 songs, and put their whole energies into a smaller selection of tracks.
I’m fairly certain this is Rick Rubin’s doing. He’s said multiple times that he encourages the band to write, and then keep writing and then keep writing, because that last stretch might be where the gold comes. That might be true, and yes, like I’ve said, a song existing and being out there for fans is better than a song not existing. But I can’t help but wonder what things would be like if they hadn’t spread themselves thin in places, what it would have done to their creativity, their passion, to the final, singular I’m with You.
If in another world there was only one album, maybe a longer one, there are a few songs on I’m Beside You that felt like they could have, or should have, been on the proper album. And there are some that I cringed at on release, wonder why they were ever recorded, and still feel extremely ambivalent about today, even as they’ve grown on me as time has gone by. (It’s not fun to feel this way. There’s very little about this band I actually genuinely dislike; I don’t think they’ve released a bad album, only the rare “bad” song.)
Which ones should have made the album? Okay, I lied, here’s that dot point review after all. Consider this my version of the “Flea likes ding dongs” note done during the Californication mixing sessions; my votes, my opinions. All subject to change after two beers.
Strange Man
I’ve loved this from the moment I first heard it, though how generous I am towards the song changes from day to day. I have vivid memories of trudging all across Sydney, hating my job, big black headphones with a tangled cord, and this song on repeat. It’s an interesting time signature for the band, and must have been tricky for Anthony to get his head around and write lyrics to. If I had to guess why it was left off the album, I’d say that it can be a little sparse compared to other songs that made it. And it’s never a good idea for Anthony to scat. There’s no universe where a song is better for it being left in. In the end, though, I think the vibe is explored more fruitfully elsewhere.
Should it have made it? Nah.
Long Progression
Apparently it was this song or “Goodbye Hooray” that was going to make the final lineup on I’m with You. It’s one of those songs where the working title ended up the real title; “Goodbye Angels” is another example. I guess that’s why it’s still listed with quote marks on the liner notes.
In an alternate universe this could have been the opening single, the introduction to Josh; it’s vintage Chili Peppers with those nonsensical upbeat verses (why on earth is Anthony praising Robert Moses? Seriously! What the hell is that line about? Hasn’t he read The Power Broker?!), but the chorus is insanely catchy, and it really soars in the final go-around, when Josh’s wailing solo overlays it.
Should it have made it? Definitely. This is what they should have been playing on TV in August of 2011, not the dreck that is “Maggie.”
Magpies On Fire
In my memory, “Magpies on Fire” coming out was the beginning of the public perception around these songs changing a little bit. The first songs were fine, great even, but this song pretty quickly reached classic status and I think has remained there to this day. A lot of people love it. This feels like it’s from the same song writing mode that produced “Pink as Floyd” and “Brendan’s Death Song,” Stones-influenced, based more around chords than one person bringing a riff in. The humming, almost out of tune backing vocals in the chorus rub me the wrong way; the claps in the final chorus do not - I love that technique!
Should it have made it? Sure. Only if Josh fixes those backing vocals.
Victorian Machinery
I love this riff. The band as wild beasts. A major moment in their “we’re not just slap bass California guys” narrative. I hold this song very, very dear to my heart but think it has one major flaw in that the “pretty” moments appear far too often. The band are clearly having the time of their life, and I can only imagine how insane it sounded in the studio. The dynamics make it fun at first, but when the soft section arrives for the third time it turns what should have been a herd of elephants stomping around into wet lettuce. To make it worse, Flea’s bass is way too busy during these bits, and suddenly there's four people playing over each other instead of with each other.
Throughout 2012 I drove my parent’s Suzuki Swift around Sydney, living my life, doing whatever it was I was doing, listening to burned data CDs full of mp3s on the car stereo. This song appeared on the shuffle far too many times; my roommate at the time - a colossal prick - always pointed out that the song changed to the soft part too frequently. He was wrong about a lot, but he wasn’t wrong about this. I started to skip it whenever it came on.
Should it have made it? Definitely. The more of this the band does the better.
Never is a Long Time
A peak. This is probably my favourite song from the entire recording sessions, one of my favourite Chili Peppers songs ever. This needed to be on the album. I cannot understand why it didn’t make it. I think it’s an ode to Everly, but it’s really about Anthony just adoring his life, 100% in the moment, and the joy is palpable. Short and sweet, a wonderful waltz of a verse, an anthemic chorus, an explosion for the whole band to get behind. That moment after the first chorus where everything turns into a collapsing glitch is such an unnecessary but wonderful addition - I can only wonder that maybe the take was flawed in some way and this is how they covered it up.
Should it have made it? Did you read what I wrote? Of course it should!
Love of Your Life
I have a special but tenuous connection to this song because it’s the “tease” I got when I saw the band live in January 2013. Just before he started the intro to “Under the Bridge,” Josh would tease a random song that wasn’t in the band’s set list at the time: “Behind the Sun,” “My Friends,” “Fortune Faded,” “Long Progression,” and so on. A few seconds, enough to give a few people in the crowd a sly little wink, and then he’d play the classic riff everyone loves. If I remember right, Chad even joined in.
Another song probably about Everly, this is quite lovely, and it actually winds up being way heavier than you expect it would be from the start - similar to “How it Ends.” At a certain point, the rest of the band cut out, and Josh plays a version of the riff alone, distorted, and its a deep, rocking moment - not something that you'd think would arrive when the song begins.
Should it have made it? I could take it or leave it.
The Sunset Sleeps
This song turned a lot of people off when it first arrived, and to this day probably still does because of Anthony’s, what shall we call them - goofy? - vocals at the beginning. I think they would have landed better if maybe the high-to-low slide was done by background vocals instead, but who knows. It’s a shame it turned people off because it’s a very nice song that develops quite a lot, mostly thanks to Anthony’s performance; the man is weary. “I’ll get by but I could use a few,” has entered my lexicon. We all know what he means.
Should it have made it? With some adjustments it’s a stone cold classic.
Hometown Gypsy
It’s the “White Braids & Pillow Chair” coda 10 years early, but without the incredible song at the beginning. I’ve long had this idea that Anthony must write lyrics sitting in front of his CD or record collection, and that’s what happened here, the 45 Grave reference is too much of a non sequitur. If people love this song, great, but I’ve tried and tried and I can’t see what the band were going for.
Should it have made it? Thanks but no thanks.
Pink as Floyd
They use the same trick here as they did in “Midnight,” where they start with the strings, then just have the rest of the band come in (“Hanalei” sorta does too). I wonder if that was intentional or not… At the 30-second mark you can hear the electric guitar track pop in, which is a surprising miss by Andrew Scheps; he did a great Masterclass style video about mixing this song. Great strings by the Sonus Quartet too, who are featured all throughout The Empyrean. I love the staccato pops towards the end.
But Anthony’s vocals let me down; those vocals feel strained, for half the song it feels like he’s just holding a single note: dayyyyy, stayyyayyyyy, taaaakeeeee. At the very end of the song, he kicks into a different gear, singing from his gut, and it sounds miles better - it’s what he should have been doing the whole time.
Should it have made it? With some adjustments.
Your Eyes Girl
Ah, fuck, shit! For some reason this song feels like a sequel to “Let’s Make Evil.” But, like that song, it does get a teensy-bit repetitive. Great vocals, great backing vocals, perhaps it can drag on a bit, and that insistence on returning back to the quiet section feels a little like “Victorian Machinery,” but the more of this type of song the better.
Should it have made it? Hell yeah. Let’s rock.
In Love Dying
I don’t want to say the band are doing a riff on Can or Neu! here, but they’re doing something pretty close to it. They’re doing their version of one of those bands. This song must have had a fascinating writing period; a hypnotic bass line, sure, and a kind of verse-chorus-verse structure, but at some point they had to have made the decision to leave it an eight minute workout instead of something shorter. Could you even do a shorter version? I suppose you could trim it down, but then you’d lose the essential magic of the song. I could listen to hours of this. I adore this song.
One thing I’d change however, is that “bridge” or solo section. Flea and Chad lay back and let Josh take over, and… he kinda just noodles for a few bars. I sense the idea is that his guitar parts are supposed to get enveloped in reverb and delay, and the whole thing is supposed to become this cloud of noises fighting over each other before quickly going back to normal when the verse resumes. But it doesn’t happen. It’s like they’ve accidentally wiped a track from the mix, or that he froze in the moment. A missed opportunity in an otherwise stone cold banger.
Should it have made it? I can’t imagine a world where this does, but I’d love to see a world where it isn’t that weird for it to be there.
Catch my Death
As I’ve said upstream, it was at this point that I started to have trouble telling any of the songs apart when they first came out. Which, at the beginning of this letter, still remained the case. The same thing happened to me when I heard Return of the Dream Canteen for the second, third, fourth time: "Wait, which one is this?"
I would see “Catch my Death” and think it was “How it Ends,” then realise what I was actually thinking of was “Open/Close.” These songs don’t sound that alike, I figured it was only because of how they were initially presented; the back end of the project, the last all-at-once release, it’s no wonder I thought one was the other. Then after some consideration I wondered, is the reason I’m confusing them is probably in the name. There’s something final about all of them. Death. Ends. Close. Perhaps?
That said, this is a fun track that could have done well on alternative rock radio. I feel bad for letting this one go unconsidered for so long. The nasal heys are back, though, and did you ever notice the chorus rhythm is basically “Detroit?”
Should it have made it? I think you’d either have to pick this or “How it Ends,” they seem to share a lot of the same characteristics.
How it Ends
Upbeat, heavy, anthemic. The bridge/solo leading into the final verse turnaround is a treat. Virtually everything I said about “Catch My Death” can be repeated here!
Should it have made it? I think you’d either have to pick this or “Catch my Death,” they seem to share a lot of the same characteristics. I think this wins out though; the bridge really uplifts the song for me.
This is the Kitt
If John had written this riff, we’d never hear the end of it. A classic. I think Anthony lets the rest of the side down though, the lyrics are his usual rhyming nothing, and the reference to, erm, “defloration” in the chorus is maybe a side of his psyche that doesn’t need to be explored. Astonishingly catchy with a major caveat; vintage Chili Peppers. I love the little mixing quirks, the heavily processed drums.
Should it have made it? I mean, sure. It’d probably be a lot of fun live.
Brave From Afar
Maybe my least favourite song from the entire recording sessions. Not bad, just dull, which is almost worse. Maybe the most egregious example of Josh’s ethereal, whiney backing vocal. It should be an upbeat rocker that gets the ol’ toes tappin’ but in the end it’s 3 and a half minutes of grey noise.
Should it have made it? Should have been left in the rehearsal studio.
Hanalei
I can imagine why Anthony decided to write about Hanalei - a town in Hawaii that I think he lives in - after hearing this song’s instrumental. It’s like cresting a wave; floating and echoey. It’s surfing on sound waves. Another chordal track, no real riffs to speak of, just good progressions that go well together. But for all of the beautiful qualities this song has, again those vocals of his go a long way towards sullying it - they sound strained over something so wonderful otherwise. The bridge/breakdown is interesting, it doesn’t really fit the song - it’s almost the same as the explosion that arrives halfway through “Dance, Dance, Dance.”
Perhaps the most frustrating song in this entire set, but on the whole I quite like it. (Of note, it contains a rare moment in the Chili Peppers canon, with Josh given his own line entirely, ala “Dosed,” “Meet Me at the Corner,” or more recently, “The Heavy Wing.”)
Should it have made it? With a few teensy changes, definitely.
Open/Close
The main argument for saying this project was sequenced intentionally was this being the final track. It would be the final track on any album for sure, if it made I’m with You it’d probably be the final track there too. It’s the kind of introspective/retrospective nature of it, the use of a children’s choir (what is it with Flea and children’s choirs?), the spoken word aspect, it almost feels like another take at “Death of a Martian.” I can’t find much to fault with the verses of this, whether it be Anthony’s love letter to his past (I tried to quote the bit where Anthony talks about Hillel and progressive rock in my book but it would have cost me $400 for like three lines. $400!), or the 5/4 (?) riff the band are locked in to. The outro is great too - AK in full preacher mode. I get the feeling 90% of fans would prefer this over “Dance, Dance, Dance,” which puzzles me.
But the chorus lets the song down for me. There’s something, I don’t know, corny about the - what, excitement? - Anthony sings with. It comes out of nowhere and derails the coolness the rest of the song possesses. Like another song tacked onto it. Which perhaps it was.
Should it have made it? With a different chorus… maybe.
And so there we have it. 17 songs, 73 minutes, a decade-plus to simmer and a few months more to have a closer look.
I started out writing this letter intending to just review and reconsider this collection of songs. What happened instead was something entirely different, something I didn't realise I had been thinking about in the background for over a decade. About band dynamics, about how the way we package songs is so important, what one set of songs can explain about a band as a whole. I’m Beside You is an experiment, a gift, an addition to the canon that moved the band forward and yet exists in the shadows. It’s an experiment in that it allowed the Chili Peppers to do things they wouldn’t have explored otherwise. It's an experiment in how they actually released it.
Contained within this release is, truly, some of their best work. Some of their most exciting work, some of their most challenging work. Work that fights back against the public perception the band has. Is it a bad thing that they’ve been “relegated” to a lesser-known compilation? It’s hard to say. Is that even a problem in an age of streaming when everything, no matter how it was initially released, is the same amount of mouse clicks away?
There are things on here that I truly think should have made the album. Hell, there are a few songs on here that would have been better mainline radio singles than what the band actually put out. As a whole, preconceived ideas about leftovers or not, I don't think that it's unquestionably better than I'm with You. If they swapped, if this was the “proper” album, and I’m with You was the b-side compilation, who knows how I’d feel. Maybe those preconceived ideas are unavoidable.
The first few songs on this compilation feel like they could have just been on the album; they end really don’t. You can feel the cohesion slipping away.
I can sense a few people skimming this letter and thinking that I should just be grateful these songs exist at all. I truly am. Grateful that these songs were released, grateful that the band gives me something to think about beyond this=good or that=bad.
Perhaps I'm not disappointed at some of the songs, just the fact they didn't get the chance to shine. Perhaps there shouldn't be b-sides at all, there should be total equality amongst the band's entire output.
Who knows what I'll think in another ten years.
But I think it’s time to go, so I will fare thee well.