When you begin to think about the mellow and dark side of this album a great place to start is the song “Otherside”, in which Anthony Kiedis tells the story of former band mate Hillel Slovak. The guitarist that preceded John Frusciante, Slovak battled with a severe addiction to Heroin, which inevitably got the better of him, and ended up taking his life in 1988. The song talks a lot about trying to conquer the addiction and then it creeping its way back in to his life, “I yell and tell it that it's not a friend, I tear it down I tear it down, And then it's born again.” However, this song isn’t just about Slovak, its about the people as a whole who get caught in this endless cycle of addiction and can’t see a way
