Red Hot Chili Peppers – Snow (Hey Oh)

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 rhythm 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 has described the snow as a blank slate, not only as a drug.