Niandra Lades and Usually Just A T-Shirt - Writing and Recording

Writing and Recording

After leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Frusciante continued to write and record solo material. He had been doing so since the age of nine, but had never considered releasing his material to the public. That was until several of his friends—including Johnny Depp, Perry Farrell, Gibby Haynes and former Red Hot Chili Peppers band mate Flea—encouraged him to release the material he wrote in his spare time during the Blood Sugar Sex Magik sessions. Frusciante began working on final cuts of the songs he had been writing, and producing them at his home in mid 1992. The production process, however, became hampered by his increasingly severe addiction to heroin. Usually Just a T-Shirt was recorded in the order it appears, with the final tracks being recorded shortly prior to Frusciante's departure from the Chili Peppers. Frusciante's use of heroin and cocaine became more extreme during the final stages of recording in late 1993; he began viewing drugs as the only way to "make sure you stay in touch with beauty instead of letting the ugliness of the world corrupt your soul."

During a 1994 interview, a visibly intoxicated Frusciante noted that he wrote the album in order to create "interesting music", which he felt no longer existed. He felt contemporary artists were not writing material he deemed worth listening to and the mainstream population were settling for mediocrity. Drugs were another significant topic Frusciante based Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt on. According to Frusciante, he "was stoned for every single note I played on the album." He increased his drug use to cope with worsening depression that was caused by leaving the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and his subsequent isolation. Several songs on the album deal with his dislike for the Chili Peppers' success, such as the album's eleventh track, "Blood on My Neck From Success".

All of the music on the record was written by Frusciante, save for the cover of hardcore punk band Bad Brains' song "Big Takeover". The track was intentionally slowed down and recorded melodically because of a pastime in which Frusciante sang punk songs in different time signatures: "It was just something I had been walking around thinking of in my head. Sometimes I'll walk around singing punk rock songs to myself, but as if they were regular songs instead of punk rock songs, you know, slow it down and make a melody instead of just yelling them out. And then the idea occurred me to record it like a Led Zeppelin ballad with mandolins and stuff." River Phoenix, a friend of Frusciante's, had contributed guitar and backing vocals to two songs that were intended be included on the record, but they were ultimately left off due to protests from his family. These were later included under different names on the album Smile From The Streets You Hold in 1997. Frusciante played all of the instruments on all of the songs that eventually were officially released on the album, including guitar, bass, piano, keyboards, mandolin, banjo, and clarinet. His girlfriend at the time, Toni Oswald, sang vocals on "Untitled #9".

Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt incorporated Frusciante's avant-garde style of song composition, with his stream-of-consciousness methodology. He recorded, mixed, produced and mastered the entire record by himself, and released it on Rick Rubin's label, American Recordings. Warner Bros., the Chili Peppers' label, originally held the rights to the album because of the leaving-artist clause in Frusciante's Chili Peppers contract. Because he was living as a recluse, however, the label gladly handed the rights over to Rubin, who released the album under his label.