Songfacts®:

• The Chili Peppers originally came up with this song, about a year before they went into the studio to record The Getaway with producer Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton. However vocalist Anthony Kiedis found it difficult to come up with the lyrics. He recalled in a track-by-track commentary:
  
  "It was one of the ones that Brian liked of our bunch, even though he hated the time signature. Brian doesn't like to muck about with complicated, atypical time signatures and that song is in something bizarre like 8/5 or just a time signature that you would never hear on the radio or in pop/rock music ever. And it made it very, very difficult to write to. So, I would drive around Echo Park and downtown, cranking that song because I love the energy and the vibe; it was psychedelic and it was free and it was explosive and it gave you a great feeling. But, trying to sing along with that time was just…I couldn't figure out where to start, where to stop, and how to compose a poem that would sing rhythmically within that.
  
  So, I failed for probably nine months, just lost, and every now and then I would sing Brian ideas like: 'I think this might work.' And he would be like: 'You can't nod your head to that, there's no head nodding to that.' He wants to be able to go like this when he's hearing music and that was like… you just couldn't get it."
• The breakthrough came when Danger Mouse had guitarist Josh Klinghoffer do an experiment where he played the chords on piano so Kiedis could hear them differently. Kiedis recalled: "Within those chords, I was able to find a melody, albeit a simple one over the verse. And, again, within that melody, I found the words. So, all of those twenty other ideas that I tried prior to that was just in the waste bin and really weren't good, but once I heard the chords played on piano I was able to figure it out."
• The lyrics find Kiedis in a psychedelic mood, painting himself as a lonely and aging "metamorphosis samurai." He said: "I think it's the freest feeling song that we have, where it just feels like you're running through a forest at night and you don't care where you're going and that's a good psychedelic representation."