Under the Bridge
by Red Hot Chili Peppers
How to study this song
The card for “Under the Bridge” is built from 52 study entries at A1+: 18 English words, 6 adjectives and 28 verb forms. Start with the glossary: partner, friend and city come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 28 distinct forms against 6 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| partner | pareja, compañero | partner, compagno | partenaire, compagnon | parceiro, companheiro |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 18
- Adjectives
- 6
- Word combos
- 15
- Expressions
- 12
- Verb forms
- 28
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Under the Bridge» is the song that carried the Red Hot Chili Peppers from the alternative rock scene onto mainstream radio. It belongs to «Blood Sugar Sex Magik», the band’s fifth studio album, which Warner Bros. Records released on 24 September 1991, and it came out as the second single from that album in the first months of 1992, after «Give It Away». Rick Rubin produced it, and the song is credited to all four members of the group at the time: the singer Anthony Kiedis, the bassist Flea, the guitarist John Frusciante and the drummer Chad Smith. The album version lasts about four minutes and twenty-four seconds.
The song began as a private poem. Kiedis had stopped using drugs some three years earlier, and during the making of the album he felt cut off from the rest of the band. At some point he put that loneliness into words and wrote them down in a notebook, with no plan to show them to anyone. Rubin found the poem while he was looking through the notebook, thought it was beautiful and asked Kiedis to take it to the others. Kiedis hesitated, because the text seemed too soft and too personal for a group known for loud, fast funk rock, but he finally sang it for them, and his bandmates began to build the music around it.
The album was recorded between April and June of 1991 in a large old house in Los Angeles known as The Mansion, where Rubin had set up a studio for the sessions. The arrangement of the song is unusual for the group. It opens with an electric guitar alone, playing a delicate figure that, according to the account given on Wikipedia, Frusciante wrote with Jimi Hendrix’s «Little Wing» in mind. The voice comes in quietly, the bass and the drums join little by little, and the song keeps growing until a choir takes over in the final section.
The words are simple and direct. The singer says that he sometimes feels he has nobody, and that his one true friend is the city he calls home, Los Angeles. He treats the city as if it were a woman who keeps him company: he drives along its streets and walks in its hills, and he feels that it knows him, watches over him and cares for him. In the chorus he asks to be carried back to a place that is dear to him, and he says he never again wants to feel the way he felt on one particular day. The last part explains that day. It remembers a spot beneath a bridge in the centre of the city, in the years when he was addicted to drugs, where he felt that he was throwing away the people he cared about and his own future.