foreign
[Music]
ever since I was a kid my specialty was
kind of riding I mean that's what came
naturally to me was was words you know
as meaningless as words can be I kind of
had fun with them putting them together
and writing about things that that maybe
other people weren't writing about
there's a song on a new record called
under the bridge which is a salad
um
valid if you will and uh and that song
came about because
um during the course of my life
I was what you might call
hardcore junkie for many years and
during that point in my life was a very
sad time and everything that was
beautiful and precious and sacred to me
sort of took a back seat as my need for
this chemical dependency this got more
and more disgusting and insane and
unfortunately I've been clean for three
years now and my life took some massive
changes and um and everything that was
sacred and beautiful beautiful that I
had lost and now come back to me more
than I could have ever hoped for but
during that time I reached some some
ultimately
low depths of incomprehensible
demoralization you know which are very
much in my memory and um
part of that incomprehensible
demoralization is loneliness
and that's that's something that I think
every drug addict can relate to is
there's this incredible deep sense of
loneliness of emptiness that you're
trying to fill up with whatever it is
in my case it was drugs
so sometimes I get these first of
loneliness that kind of remind me of
that point in my life and one day I was
driving back from the rehearsal for this
last record that we are riding and and I
got one of those bursts of loneliness
and I didn't really feel like there was
a single soul in the universe that I
could connect with you know on a gut
level on a heart level on a spiritual
level on a level of love I just felt
like I was all by myself so I started
singing to myself on the freeway on the
Hollywood freeway coming back from
rehearsal and with that without thinking
about anything
um an entire song came through my head
and when I got home I wrote it down
and uh
and the Crux of the song is based on
loneliness and there's this one little
lyrical phrase that comes in at the very
end of the song which says under the
bridge downtown
is where I drew some blood under the
bridge downtown
forgot about my love under the bridge
downtown I could not get enough under
the bridge downtown I gave my life away
and what that was referring to was a
point in time about five years ago
when when I had nothing in my life I had
no no friends or
or places to live or automobiles or
relationships with my family and all I
had was this uh this connection of mine
named Mario who is a Mexican Mafia
ex-convict and he and I would stroll the
streets of downtown looking for our next
score and on one particular afternoon it
was very hot in the middle of the summer
and I'd been up for days
he and I found what we're looking for
and we went to this bridge that was
downtown in the middle of Los Angeles in
this ghetto and it was a freeway bridge
and there was a little passageway that
you had to go to to get under the bridge
and only certain members of this Mexican
gang which were all ex-convicts were
allowed to go in there and the reason
that they let me in is because this guy
Mario said that I was going out with his
sister which was a lie just so we could
go in there and do what it is we wanted
to do which was to use these particular
drugs we had just gotten and that always
sticks in my brain as um
you know a low point in my life
basically you know about as low as I
could get and um
the chorus of the song is I don't ever
want to
and I don't ever wanna feel like I did
that day take me to the place I love
taking me all the way in the place I
love is where I am now
um
making music with my band and
to me you know you know the most sacred
thing that I have going is uh is
creating sound with my best friends