The original members of Jane’s Addiction are a diverse bunch. There’s trippy visionary singer/stylist and Lollapalooza co-founder Perry Farrell; Stephen Perkins, the monster drummer with a goofy-meets-spiritual vibe; and bassist Eric Avery, who opted not to be part of the 1997 and 2001 Jane’s reunions and played with Garbage from 2005 to 2022.
Then there’s multi-faceted musician Dave Navarro, who in addition to his work with Jane's, spent five years with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and brough his guitar stylings to songs by Janet Jackson, Nine Inch Nails, Alanis Morissette and Guns N’ Roses. The Los Angeles native has made headlines with high-profile romances, TV reality appearances, television hosting duties, and in numerous all-star collaborations and benefit performances.
But Jane’s Addiction, which formed Los Angeles in 1985, has his heart. The group’s groundbreaking 1988 major label debut Nothing Shocking and follow-up Ritual De Lo Habitual marked the band as progenitors of the alternative scene. Their DIY aesthetic in videos, art and music resulted in subversively joyful creations, including the chart-topping "Been Caught Stealing."
However, egos, creative differences and substances interferred in the band’s trajectory, and a 1991 farewell tour also marked the inception of the first Lollapalooza and of Farrell as business mogul.
Jane’s Addiction may have helped make alternative rock mainstream, but never lost their sense of edgy creativity. They performed and recorded on and off in the ‘90 and early 2000s, in various incarnations with and without Navarro. The original lineup reunited in May 2024 at Bush Hall in London; that victorious, energized live return led to songwriting, with new single “Imminent Redemption” offering up lyrics that seem to be a rallying cry for Jane’s circa 2024 and onward: “Let's make some good trouble / Let's stir up that karma / Let's launch us a comeback.”
The track dropped ahead of a 23-city tour that kicked off on Aug. 9 at Fontainebleau Las Vegas. GRAMMY.com caught up with an energized, loquacious Navarro ahead of that jaunt, Jane’s first with the OG 1985 lineup in 14 years.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Listening to "Imminent Redemption" conjured a mental image of shaking up a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola; You want to rock out, explosively, and you finally get to do it.
To me, it feels like a follow-up to Ritual. The band right now is in such a great place. We have the original lineup. God bless Chris Chaney, who's one of the best bass players in the world, one of my best friends. He stood in and he did two records with us,15, 20 years.
A lot of the Jane's Addiction material is primarily written from basslines Eric Avery comes up with, and those are usually the memorable singable parts of the song. You might sing the vocal, but you're not singing the guitar part. Sometimes you're not singing the vocal part, but you're singing the intro to "Mountain [Song]" in your head, or the intro to "Three Days." His input is really the musical backbone of the band. When we got together to do these [new] songs, that was immediately there.
We also wanted to keep the music under-produced. We didn't want to go crazy with modern-day technology and all kinds of crazy instrumentation, overdubs and tracks; we wanted to keep it pretty raw. In fact, I think there's parts of "Imminent Redemption" that are reminiscent of Ritual and Nothing Shocking, but I also think it's reminiscent of the Triple X record [1987’s Jane’s Addiction] because there aren't 15 guitar tracks. There aren't synths, there aren't all kinds of things that we ended up doing as we went on and probably will do on other songs.
Lyrically, Perry's coming from such a... I don't want to speak for him, but my interpretation is that it's an aggressive cry for unity and peace. There's a little bit of anger there, but anger in the name of let's not have any anger anymore, if that makes any sense.
It does.
Another weird thing about Jane's Addiction is a lot of our most well-known songs — "Mountain Song," "Stop," "Ocean Size," "Jane Says" — they really don't have choruses. They just, say, have two parts to go back and forth.
So the fact that we got away with "Imminent" and we're able to put a chorus in there is kind of unusual. But I think it works, and it still kind of keeps it like the two-part formula of Jane's Addiction. But then the outro goes into another musical direction, which is also very us, because we get bored within songs.
Do you think "Imminent Redemption" will grow into a record?
There might be stuff I can't talk about, but no one's told me not to talk about it, so that's their problem, I guess!
The idea is to release a full-length album; I would consider it the fourth Jane's Addiction record. The two records we did with Chris Chaney I love, but it's a different band. With this lineup, I really feel like this next record's going to be the follow-up to Ritual. It's really special to be back with Eric and writing with Eric; Eric and I have always worked really well off each other in terms of finding parts that work together and complement one another but are not really the same.It's like we picked up just where we left off.
I don't know if we're going to put out a record or if we're going to put out a song every once in a while. Whatever that master plan is, that I can't speak to. It's either a song comes out every month until there's 12 songs, or we put out a couple songs and then we put out the record. I don't know. We have plenty of completed material already, so it's one way or another it'll all be out there.
A "follow-up record" more than 30 years later…
In some ways, it was such a shame for the band to part at such a musical peak, because I think that record [Ritual] is really, really special. But it also saved us from following it up with something subpar. So it is just part of the legacy. It's part of the story. And so far I've been really happy with everything we've been making.
How has it felt being back on the road?
We just finished a two-month tour of Europe, and I was so grateful to be back out, and doing it with the band, and being able to do it. But man, it was challenging.
It still has that [feel of] the early days, where we were on this edge of this cliff where nobody really knew what was going to happen from time to time, from song to song, in between songs, what Perry was going to say or do. Or if he was going to all of a sudden just go into some stream-of-consciousness banter in the middle of a breakdown of a song. And you just kind of have to pay attention and just feel where it's going to change.
We kind of lost that for a long time. And now that element of surprise has come back to the shows. Also, I think the fact that this last tour was just the four of us on stage with minimal to no production, a couple of lights and four guys playing weird music, that's all we needed. It left room for there to be magical moments that gave you goosebumps because you weren't distracted by a bunch of stuff.
In the broadest sense, what is at the core of what makes this lineup special?
Stephen Perkins and I were in high school together, and we had a heavy metal band. We played heavy metal covers, we wrote heavy metal songs, and we were into technical wizardry. We were into fast guitar playing. He was into Neil Peart.
Perry, at the same time, was doing a goth band called Psi Com. Eric was more in the new wave punk rock world. He was doing different experimental stuff. And we ended up getting together as a result of Stephen dating Eric's sister. Perry and Eric met, and started playing together, and they needed a drummer and a guitar player. And they called us and we got in there.
The formula is that the four of us have no business being together in a band given our backgrounds. Now, since then, they've grown to love some of the music Stephen and I came up with. We've grown to love the music that they came up with. And then it kind of just blossomed.
We decided we weren't any particular kind of band. We were just musicians, and we would just pull from anything. If we wanted to go in a Pink Floyd direction, we'll do that. If we want to go in a Black Sabbath direction, we'll do that. If we want to go in an Iggy direction, we'll do that. But without consciously choosing to, just being open to all genres.
Fans would agree.
That’s kind of like the secret sauce: Combining elements that wouldn't normally go together and putting them together and seeing what happens. It's been a long road. Although in our older years, we do get along very well and have a lot of respect for each other. But coming up and through the early years, it was difficult. There were resentments, there were stylistic differences of opinions. There were multiple breakups, multiple problems that just came from adolescent ego.
Now that we're all at the ages we're at, and just about everybody has a family, we kind of just let go of that. We’re just, "You know what? We had something really special back then, and I don't know what we were complaining about." So we're doing it again.
Morgan Enos and Katherine Turman contributed to this story.