Former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer has shared a new song from his Pluralone solo project, “The Night Won’t Scare Me.” The track will appear on Pluralone’s upcoming album, I Don’t Feel Well, out October 16th.
“The Night Won’t Scare Me” is a sprawling bit of piano-driven rock, cut with blazing guitars and anchored by a gripping vocal performance from Klinghoffer. Klinghoffer tells Rolling Stone that the track began with a chord progression he originally wrote while still with RHCP, but that he completed in a burst of creativity after his departure.
“Obviously people won’t know where these words are coming from specifically — I don’t even know all the time — but this is a perfect combination of words from this past year, maybe year and a half,” he says of “The Night Won’t Scare Me.” “It speaks, albeit abstractly, to many things that have been going on. It also has, to me, a hopeful, yet annoyed sense to it, which I’d say is apt. It’s hard not to be remarkably annoyed and irritated these days, yet, for some insane and inexplicable reason… I’m hopeful.”
I Don’t Feel Well, which is available to preorder, follows Pluralone’s debut album, To Be One With You, which was released last November. Klinghoffer began working on the new record in March — just as the coronavirus pandemic was taking root in the United States — and he says this was the first time, maybe ever, that he’d been able to write, record and release something in one continuous stretch of time.
While working on I Don’t Feel Well, Klinghoffer says he never lost sight of how privileged he was to be able to focus fully on his music during a tumultuous summer.
“At some point along the way, I asked myself why I do this, and I guess once admitting that there was a desire to try to make the world a little better place — if I can believe that writing songs is me doing that — I can feel it’s OK,” he says. “So often I’m embarrassed to imagine for a second that anything I’m doing could do such a thing, but that negative thinking… is not helpful. Even though a lot of the world right now seems to feed and thrive off a constant diet of negativity, disgust and anger, I tried to remind myself that I really want to make something people might find beautiful. If it came anywhere close to doing what music I love does for me, then not only am I grateful and honored, but I’m maybe, in a little teeny tiny way, doing what I set out to.”
From Rolling Stone US