I just was listening to "By The Way", a lovely album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it brings back memories. It's really funny how sometimes certain albums are like soundtracks to your life, and sometimes those albums don't really make sense. Even though I am a 20-year old woman from Michigan, I feel a real connection to these songs written by these 30- and 40-something guys from California . . . Maybe it's not so much the lyrics as it is just the feel of the album. I remember that two years ago, not long after I got the album, I took a trip to Haiti with my economics class. There were like 18 of us, and we were gone for 9 days in November. By the end of the trip, I was sick of like 90% of my classmates, and I was seriously homesick and missing everything, and just so tired and upset that I just sat in the airport at Port-au-Prince and thought, "I hate these fuckin' people. I hate everyone." I felt like crying for the last 2 days of the trip, that's how emotionally wrung-out I was. Haiti is so intense-- the people and the poverty and all this crazy beauty that you see there-- and being with all my classmates was intense, you know, 24 hours a day. Anyway, we all bought headphones on the way back, because the flight from Haiti to Florida was on one of those big like 500-seat planes, and it had its own radio system or whatever, you could plug these headphones into the armrest and hear music or talk show or French pilot chatter, whatever. Well I was flipping through the like 12 channels on this thing, until I heard the words "Chili Peppers" and then I stopped. I almost did cry when I heard "On Mercury"-- it was a radio show hosted by, oddly enough, Leeza Gibbens or whomever she is, and it was featuring songs from "By the Way". That was when I realized that I didn't just like "By the Way"; it felt like home, it felt like my life. It was my soundtrack. It still is.

Hello. I am new here at songmeanings.net. I am a huge RHCP (and if you have to ask, you'll never know) fan, but I like a lot of different kinds of music.