DAVE NAVARRO Talks New JANE'S ADDICTION Album

Steven Rosen of Ultimate-Guitar.com recently conducted an interview with JANE'S ADDICTION guitarist Dave Navarro. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: Though people may not think about it but the acoustic guitar has always been a big part of what JANE'S ADDICTION does.

Navarro: JANE'S ADDICTION has always celebrated the instrument, whether it's a straight-up acoustic song or whether it's a rock song that incorporates acoustics and goes into acoustic breaks. It's just such a great way to shift gears. Especially if you listen to something like — and I hate to go back and date myself — but if you go to "Nothing's Shocking" and listen to "Ocean Size", which is probably one of our more aggressive songs, the thing starts with acoustic guitar and breaks down to acoustic guitar twice within the song. And it's just such a great tool for a dynamic gearshift within the studio that I love.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: A lot of JANE'S music does get written acoustically first?

Navarro: Yeah. We spend time on the couch and Perry [Farrell] is singing out without a microphone; Stephen [Perkins] on bongos; acoustic bass and acoustic guitar. Really paying attention to the lyrics and the melody and paying attention to what each other is playing and then we'll adjust when we get up on the big stage. That has become a real important aspect for us as a band and I don't think that we would be where we're at and I don't think we would have the body of work we have without the acoustic.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: You sometimes don't think of JANE'S ADDICTION as a trio because there are so many guitar parts going on in a lot of the songs.

Navarro: Yeah, well, that's the thing is like live I've gotta be naked out there trying to do my best to cover all this stuff so you better bet that goddamn well that in the studio I'm gonna be puttin' 500 guitars on everything. But, you know, I feel like it's not my job to reproduce the record; the record is one thing and live is another and of my great escape clauses is listening to bootlegs of ZEPPELIN on an off night. And just go, "Well, you know, see it's OK, LED ZEPPELIN, they're doin' it, so I guess it's not that big a deal." It's just kinda that Page school: this is the record and this is what I'm doin' in the studio and live it is what it is. And we're fuckin' rockin' it out anyway.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: Any feelings about the "Live Voodoo" DVD that came out a while ago?

Navarro: It's a bittersweet recording for me because it's the last recording that anybody can ever see with Eric Avery. It's nice to have that documented but it's also bittersweet because it's the last visual recording of the band with Eric Avery. To be honest with you, I haven't sat through the whole thing. I don't know. Once I get off tour with the band, the last thing I do is sit and home and watch the show back. I'm kinda ready to see something else. You know what I mean? I've got a season of "Dexter" to catch up on so the "Live Voodoo" DVD is probably pretty far down in my cue.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: How are the sessions going for the new JANE'S album? The band hasn't recorded together since the "Strays" album back in 2003.

Navarro: Yeah, it's going really good. It's really hard to describe something that no one can hear.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: I understand.

Navarro: The best job I can do is to say that we are staying within the parameters of JANE'S ADDICTION which are no parameters and each song is its own thing. At times you wonder if they're all gonna fit on the same record and then you think, "But [with] JANE'S ADDICTION they shouldn't feel like they should be on the same record." If one thing is that diverse from the last? Then we're doin' something right. And we're just experimenting a lot with different sounds and different instrumentation. And I'm actually kind of trying to approach my guitar playing on this record in a lot simpler of a way than I ever have. I think it's time. My favorite guitar players from the '80s are probably the simplest players around there and I'm pretty inspired by them right now.

Read the entire interview from Ultimate-Guitar.com.