‘Tippa My Tongue’ by Red Hot Chili Peppers: ‘It’s Got P-Funk In It’

The Red Hot Chili Peppers launch the campaign for their next album, Return of the Dream Canteen, four and a half months after releasing their previous album, Unlimited Love, with a new single and video, “Tippa My Tongue.”

The sinewy funk-rock track harkens back to early Red Hot Chili Peppers material, with frontman Anthony Kiedis experimenting with lyrical double entendre until he declares, “I believe in love, perfectly receiving love.”

“There’s a lot of variety in there.” “It has a lot of hooks in it,” drummer Chad Smith tells Billboard. “It has P-Funk in it.” I hear George (Clinton) and some Hendrix-like licks. It’s a tasty gumbo. That seemed like a good first cone to emerge from that. It sounds familiar but different. That’s fine with me.”

“We just want to leave ’em wanting less,” Smith jokes, before explaining that “it was just the four of us in a room and we just wrote a bunch of music and wrote and wrote and wrote with no time constraints and ended up recording all these songs.” We always record more than what is released on a record, but they are frequently left in the vault, unfinished, or whatever. But we got through them all. We simply felt we had too many good songs to not release another record. It’s not like a B-sides collection or anything. Everything felt good and right, so, yeah, it’s all good.”
Smith feels that Return of the Dream Canteen “stands alone” from Unlimited Love, although listeners will find sonic similarities “because it was all done at the same time and recorded in the same place. So it has continuity in that way. We were thinking about it before Unlimited Love came out; we were thinking, ‘These (songs) go together here and these go together there, and look, we’ve got two great things.”

Smith attributes the band’s productivity to the band’s concentrated time off the road as a result of the pandemic, as well as Frusciante’s return to the band. “I thought the John ship had sailed,” admits the drummer. “Eleven years passed, and he was doing his own thing.” So I was surprised when Anthony asked, ‘What do you think about John rejoining the band?’ Wow! Really?! That had not occurred to me. ” But, as we all know, he’s a one-of-a-kind individual and an incredible musician. Having the opportunity to play with him, write with him, and perform with him again is something we cherish and hope to do again. And it just felt natural once we started paling together. For whatever reason, when the four of us work together, we create something special, and there is chemistry, and chemistry is everything in a band. Everyone would want some if I could bottle it.”
As “Tippa My Tongue” comes out the Chili Peppers are in the midst of the North American leg of its Global Stadium Tour, which wraps on Oct. 16 at the Austin City Limits Festival in Austin, Texas. The group tours Australia and New Zealand starting Jan. 21, and is expected to play other territories during 2023 as well.
“When Live Nation approached us and said…we think you guys can do stadiums, we were like, ‘What? Whoa, I don’t know about that,’ but it’s going very well,” Smith says. “People are so happy to be going to concerts again and we’re happy to be playing them again, so it’s this mutual feeling of joy and relief. And I’ll humbly say that we’re playing very well, that Anthony is singing better than ever, and that John is completely committed and invested. There are a lot of happy faces now.”

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