guitaryourself:

Under the Bridge

Kiedis wrote much of the song’s lyrics during a period when he felt distraught and emotionally drained. He had maintained sobriety for roughly three years and felt that this had distanced him from his bandmates. While the group worked on Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Frusciante and Flea often smoked marijuana together, decisively ignoring and disregarding Kiedis who was clean at the time and preferred to be in a drug-free environment. Because of this, Kiedis felt that Frusciante was “no longer in [his] world.” Driving home after rehearsal in April 1991, Kiedis felt a profound sense of loss; his best friends, Flea and Frusciante, in some form resented him. The depressed state of mind he subsequently entered reminded him of his heroin and cocaine addiction during the relationship he had with former girlfriend Ione Skye. The dejection he was experiencing, coupled with memories of Skye and prior drug use, led to emotional distress: “the loneliness that I was feeling triggered memories of my time with Ione and how I’d had this beautiful angel of a girl who was willing to give me all of her love, and instead of embracing that, I was downtown with fucking gangsters shooting speedballs under a bridge.”