Kiedis heard flamenco in a riff that still left room to sing
John Frusciante brought the guitar part in already dense. On the Stadium Arcadium DVD commentary, Anthony Kiedis remembers hearing, to the naked ear, something rhythmically complicated, “almost like some kind of flamenco business,” and wondering how bass, drums and a vocal were supposed to sit on it. Frusciante’s answer was that the song gets written when each player adds a part, because he often does not know the groove until the others arrive. They found it quickly. Flea plays double stops. Chad Smith keeps a moderate pulse. A Mellotron flute, Frusciante’s Mk VI, holds a harmony. The key is G sharp minor, around 105 beats a minute. The album version runs 5:35.
Rick Rubin recorded it at The Mansion in Los Angeles during the 2005 sessions for the double album, a block of work the live archive places between March and December. Stadium Arcadium came out in Germany on 5 May 2006 and in the United States on 9 May, on Warner Bros. The band had already played Snow (Hey Oh) in public: 14 April 2006, at the Canvas Club in London, before most people had the record. It was not the first single. Dani California and Tell Me Baby went out ahead. This one followed on 20 November 2006, with Funny Face and I’ll Be Your Domino on the B-side. A radio edit cut it to about four minutes.
Kiedis has described the lyric as survival and a clean start. The line he keeps returning to is the blank slate: a canvas of snow, a chance to begin again after making a mess. The words also name the well he is not sure he can go back to, and the white field where tracks disappear. Listeners heard cocaine and heroin in the title, two powders he had already written about for years. He did not need the image to be only a drug. The snow in the quote is the reset.
I’ve made a mess of everything, but I have a blank slate, a canvas of snow, and I get to start over.
(Anthony Kiedis, on Snow (Hey Oh))
On 17 January 2007 the single became the band’s eleventh number one on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart, and it stayed there five weeks. It was the third in a row from Stadium Arcadium, after Dani California and Tell Me Baby. The Hot 100 peak was number 22. Britain matched Tell Me Baby at number 16. Germany, where the band had rarely had a big single, took it to number 5. Before it was even a single it had climbed the UK iTunes chart in May, on album sales alone.
The video almost had a different director. Tony Kaye, who had made Dani California, told MTV he would shoot this one too. His footage was not used. Warner sent Nick Wickham to the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, for the shows on 17 and 18 October 2006. The clip is the band on that stage, plus black and white film of the crowd in the parking lot and the lines outside. No desert, no silver paint, no video-game avatars. The picture matches the song: four people playing a part that sounded too busy, and a chorus that still found a place to stand.
