(Credits: Far Out / LG전자 / Sven Mandel)
Mon 22 September 2025 22:30, UK
Edward Norton‘s status as a Red Hot Chili Peppers superfan and close friend of the band has been common knowledge for a long time.
The Fight Club star has been spotted dancing up a storm at Chili Peppers’ gigs in recent years, and the band’s iconic bassist Flea played on a song used in Norton’s 2019 directorial effort Motherless Brooklyn. Norton has also revealed that he is in personal contact with singer Anthony Keidis, which is how he was able to find out the backstory behind a recent song he considers one of the greatest things the band has ever recorded.
As with most showbiz stories these days, the tale of Norton’s infatuation with a recent RHCP track that mainstream audiences probably don’t know exists came to light on a podcast. Fittingly, that podcast was Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton, and it treated fans to almost three hours of the American History X star waxing lyrical about the band to their most frequent producer. Obviously, Norton went through a potted history of his fandom, but became most passionate when speaking about the Chili’s latest works, the 2022 albums Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen.
It’s not often that a band as long in the tooth as RHCP creates an album that can stack up with their best material after four decades making music. It’s even rarer that, even if a band manages this miraculous accomplishment, their fans acknowledge it as such. However, these records, which were created in a burst of creativity fuelled by the return of mercurial guitarist John Frusciante, showcased a band renewed with vigour and purpose.
The band recorded nearly 50 tracks, and initially intended to release 40 of them in a seven-disc box set. Warner Records understandably baulked at this, but compromised by allowing two separate studio albums with 34 tracks between them, released six months apart. 34 tracks of new material released in one calendar year is still a lot of RHCP content to spring on an unsuspecting public, but it wound up music to everyone’s ears, especially Unlimited Love, which most agreed was the marginally stronger record.
(Credits: Red Hot Chilli Peppers)
This album was full of many of the best songs RHCP had written since the last time Frusciante was around (2006’s double-album Stadium Arcadium), but it was the bizarrely named 12th track, ‘White Braids & Pillow Chair’, that affected Norton most strongly. When he spoke to Rubin, who produced both albums, he noted, “When I pulled up, I was playing… ‘White Braids & Pillow Chair’. I think it’s one of the best things they’ve ever done.”
He went on to praise the back half of the album, with other tracks like ‘It’s Only Natural’ and ‘Let ‘Em Cry’ also wowing him. “They’re in such a fucking groove,” he gushed. “I was listening to it over and over and over again.”
While those songs were great, and Norton was stunned by the “level of musicianship” on display, he couldn’t get ‘White Braids & Pillow Chair’ in particular out of mind. He wanted to know the story behind the song because, as with many RHCP tunes, the meaning of the lyrics wasn’t immediately obvious. This is common in the band’s discography, because Keidis has always written lyrics that are a teensy bit impenetrable at best, and defiantly nonsensical at worst.
So, Norton did the only thing a famous man with connections like him can do in that situation: he went straight to the horse’s mouth. He wrote to Keidis and claimed the singer responded, “I saw the scene of those two people in a cafe, like, 20 years ago, and I wrote it down. I’ve been sitting on the image of this couple.”
In other interviews, Keidis confirmed this inspiration. It really was an elderly hippie couple in a cafe, and the song truly was 20 years in the making. In his recollection, the man “was immaculate with his waist-long white braids” and his “beautiful partner” had brought a pillow with her to make the hard coffee shop seat more comfortable.
“I fell in love with their love, and made a mental note,” Keidis remembered. “White braids and pillow chair needs to be a song someday.”
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