“Californication” by Red Hot Chili Peppers

The title track of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' seventh album, the 1999 record Rick Rubin produced, "Californication" finally went out as a single on Warner Bros. in June 2000. All four Peppers, Anthony Kiedis, Flea, John Frusciante and Chad Smith, share the writing credit, with Kiedis supplying the words, while Jim Scott engineered and mixed it and Greg Kurstin sat in on keyboards.

It's a slow, rueful thing, built on a circling guitar line as clean and melancholy as a sunset over a parking lot, and Kiedis sounds less like a party animal than a man reading the fine print on the dream. Rubin keeps it spare and close, so every sigh lands.

It got to 69 on the Hot 100 and 16 in the UK, but rock radio is where it truly landed, going all the way to the top of both Billboard's Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock Tracks charts.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.