Perry Farrell has rarely sat still over a career stretching back over four decades. He’s best known as the singer and flamboyant frontman of Jane’s Addiction and Porno For Pyros, as well as time spent as an artist, activist, surfer, escort and more. He’s done it all has Perry. Jane’s Addiction are currently gearing up for a bout of touring that will kick off in May but, speaking to this writer back in 2021, Farrell was in a state of what he called “divorce from the music industry”. He seemed to be enjoying the split and his new project at the time was Perry Farrell’s Kind Heaven Orchestra, a collective that included the late, great Taylor Hawkins. He explained how the pair had come together to write a song for one of their pals.
“Taylor is one of my best friends,” Farrell said. “He’s got Foo Fighters and I’ve got Jane’s Addiction, but we still like to write on side-projects. I wouldn’t call Kind Heaven Orchestra a side-project, it’s my hard focus. Taylor came by and he had this groove and he had an idea. He wanted to write a song for a friend of ours who was going through a bad time. The world was newly-quarantined and this guy was losing his wife and kids, they were moving out, they were leaving him. And he's a great man and a great musician as well. And so is she. So we wanted to cheer him up. You know, we met up with him. And he was just in a bad way. The situation was fresh, he didn't quite know what to do, he was coming down to earth, he was drinking too much, and everything else too much, getting into fights. So we thought we'd write a good song for him to kind of settle him down.”
Farrell was tight-lipped on the intended recipient of the song but, reading between the lines, you’d hazard a guess it was for Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme, a pal of both Farrell and Hawkins and who matches the description above – Homme and ex-wife Brody Dalle, singer and guitarist with The Distillers, separated in 2019. The song, titled Mend, was released in 2021 and Farrell said whoever it was written for appreciated it. “I hear that he liked it a lot,” said the Jane’s Addiction man. “We actually wanted to get him on the track. But he wasn't in shape to do it. So we went on but I hear that he likes it a lot. I'm happy and hope he's happy.”
Listen to Mend below:
