As expected, the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers' new album, Unlimited Love, debuted this week at Number One, marking the band's first chart-topper since 2006's Stadium Arcadium. Billboard reported, the album, “bows with 97,500 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending April 7th, according to Luminate. . . Of Unlimited Love’s 97,500 equivalent album units earned, album sales comprise 82,500 (it’s the top-selling album of the week); SEA units comprise 14,500 (equaling 18.96 million on-demand official streams of the set’s songs); and TEA units comprise 500.”
Unlimited Love marks the return of guitarist John Frusciante, who leaft the band in 2009. Heroin addiction originally took Frusciante out of action in 1993, but he rejoined the Peppers six years later, playing on 1999's massively successful Californication and 2002's By The Way. He left again after 2009's Stadium Arcadium, making some 14 studio LP's during an eclectic solo run.
Drummer Chad Smith told us a while back that he never imagined that his career would go as far as it has: “Never in my wildest dreams if you had come up to me and said, 'Hey, y'know, you're gonna move to California and join the Chili Peppers and then 25 years later you're gonna be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and you're gonna sell millions of records and travel all over the world and blah blah blah blah blah. . .' I'd have just said, 'You are hiiiiiigh.' I can't really comprehend it too much.”
The key to the Chili Peppers remains the bond shared by frontman Anthony Kiedis and bassist Flea. Not too long ago we asked Kiedis to sum up what it is about his friendship with Flea that has inspired all this incredible music: “Oh, I don’t know because I’m a little too deeply in the forest to really see the trees like that. I can tell you how it hasn’t changed. We still love each other with all of our hearts. Like with any long-term, intimately close friendship like that, you have a lot of highs and lows and this is just one of those marriages that persists.”
