Europe got the single. America already had the album track
The Red Hot Chili Peppers played Universally Speaking in public before the album existed as a product. The live archive dates the first performance to 18 August 2001, at V Festival in Stafford. By the Way would not reach shops until 9 July 2002. By then the song had been through Cello Studios in Los Angeles, where Rick Rubin recorded the album between October 2001 and May 2002. The four writers are the same as on the rest of the record: Anthony Kiedis, Flea, John Frusciante, Chad Smith. The track runs 4:19. Frusciante’s guitar is melodic and clean, closer to the choruses of this album than to the slap funk of 1991, and his harmony vocal sits next to Kiedis instead of behind him.
Warner Bros. did not treat it as an American single. By the Way, The Zephyr Song, Can’t Stop and Dosed had already carried the album on US radio. Universally Speaking came out as the fourth and last single, and only in Europe and Australia, on 16 June 2003. The UK chart shows it entering on 28 June at number 27, its peak, then dropping. It also reached number 5 on the UK rock chart, 42 in Ireland, 43 in Italy and 80 in Australia. XFM called it a fairly upbeat rock ode. The CD single carried a John Frusciante mix, a live acoustic By the Way, and, on another edition, Slowly Deeply, an older outtake that had been sitting around since the Californication era.
The video, directed by Dick Rude, is a sequel, not a performance clip. In the By the Way video, Kiedis leaves a book in a cab. Dave Sheridan, playing the same unhinged passenger, spends Universally Speaking trying to give it back. The book is Lexicon Devil, Brendan Mullen’s biography of Darby Crash of the Germs. Sheridan finally gets on stage while the band is playing Suck My Kiss and hands it over. Rude had already directed Catholic School Girls Rule in the 1980s and the live film Off the Map. He knew the joke the band was willing to repeat.
Kiedis stretches his voice into some Beatlesque psychedelia on Universally Speaking.
(Rolling Stone, review of By the Way, July 2002)
The lyric is Kiedis in pursuit: a face that is elegant and tired, a chase, a line about dying to get high, and a refrain that claims he wins in the long run. By 2002 he had been off heroin since 2000. The song does not explain the recovery. It keeps the old vocabulary and sets it against Frusciante’s brighter chords. Rolling Stone, reviewing the album in July 2002, heard Beatles-like psychedelia in the vocal and listed the track among the ones that could own summer radio, next to This Is the Place and Midnight.
After the single, the song stayed in two official packages. It is on Greatest Hits (November 2003) and on Live in Hyde Park, recorded at the three London shows in June 2004. It was never the song that broke a chart in the United States. It was the one that closed the By the Way campaign in the countries that still wanted another single, with a video that only makes sense if you have already seen the cab ride. The book gets returned. The album had already been out for eleven months.
