The Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Under the Bridge”
What lead singer Anthony Kiedis originally perceived to be an overly emotional poem that he felt reluctant to show to his bandmates ended up becoming one the biggest singles of his band’s career—not to mention one of the quintessential songs about addiction and recovery. Kiedis supposedly wrote “Under the Bridge” when he was three years sober in an effort to describe the impact that drugs had on his life and how his sobriety was negatively impacting his relationship with his bandmates, leading him to believe that his only companion was the city of Los Angeles (“Sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in, the city of angels”). “I felt an unspoken bond between me and my city,” Kiedissaid in his 2004 autobiography Scar Tissue. “I'd spent so much time wandering through the streets of LA and hiking through the Hollywood Hills that I sensed there was a nonhuman entity, maybe the spirit of the hills and the city, who had me in her sights and was looking after me." The song appeared on their 1992 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik and ended up reaching number two on the Billboard charts, catapulting the Chili Peppers into the mainstream. Kiedis, meanwhile, bounced in and out of treatment facilities for years before reportedly kicking his heroin addiction for good in December 2000.
What lead singer Anthony Kiedis originally perceived to be an overly emotional poem that he felt reluctant to show to his bandmates ended up becoming one the biggest singles of his band’s career—not to mention one of the quintessential songs about addiction and recovery. Kiedis supposedly wrote “Under the Bridge” when he was three years sober in an effort to describe the impact that drugs had on his life and how his sobriety was negatively impacting his relationship with his bandmates, leading him to believe that his only companion was the city of Los Angeles (“Sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in, the city of angels”). “I felt an unspoken bond between me and my city,” Kiedissaid in his 2004 autobiography Scar Tissue. “I'd spent so much time wandering through the streets of LA and hiking through the Hollywood Hills that I sensed there was a nonhuman entity, maybe the spirit of the hills and the city, who had me in her sights and was looking after me." The song appeared on their 1992 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik and ended up reaching number two on the Billboard charts, catapulting the Chili Peppers into the mainstream. Kiedis, meanwhile, bounced in and out of treatment facilities for years before reportedly kicking his heroin addiction for good in December 2000.
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