JANE'S ADDICTION guitarist Dave Navarro is featured in a new interview with Ultimate-Guitar.com. An excerpt is available below.

Q: People may not think about it but the acoustic guitar has always been a big part of what Jane’s Addiction does.

Navarro: "Jane’s Addiction has always celebrated the instrument whether it’s a straight up acoustic song or whether it’s a rock song that incorporates acoustics and goes into acoustic breaks. It’s just such a great way to shift gears. Especially if you listen to something like – and I hate to go back and date myself – but if you go to Nothing’s Shocking and listen to 'Ocean Size', which is probably one of our more aggressive songs, the thing starts with acoustic guitar and breaks down to acoustic guitar twice within the song. And it’s just such a great tool for a dynamic gearshift within the studio that I love."

Q: There was also the 'Jane Says' track from Nothing’s Special which you touched on before as being the band’s closer in concert. So the acoustic guitar has been a major part of what the band did from the outset. Was this an unspoken thing that you came in with your acoustic guitar and it just became part of Jane’s’ sound or was it a conscious choice to make that texture part of the sound?

Navarro: "What’s weird about Janes especially in the early days is that we would go through phases of gravitating towards stylistic choices that were definitely not in at the times when we were gravitating towards them. I can say there was about a six-month window where Perry and I had this house like out in, god, I don’t even know where it was but it was in some like really foresty suburb of LA. And we just kind of sat around and like cooked fish and smoked weed and made acoustic music and got really into some kind of bizarre hippie sub-culture. This sounds weird but the whole environment was kind of like if there was such a thing as a positive Manson family [laughs.] Instead of killing people we were writing songs."

Q: What was some of the music that came out of that period?

Navarro: "There’s a song called 'Slow Divers' [from Kettle Whistle] which is arguably one of our more hippie-dippie numbers you can find and that song came out of there. And that was just him and me sittin’ around the pool like I said, eatin’ healthy clean food. I think we both kind of, that was the time we were like, 'OK, we’re gonna get clean off of the heroin and only smoke weed and let’s play acoustic music.' It was a good time and even though we moved through that phase and didn’t stay with that way of life, the experience stayed with us and it became an inherent part of the band. The use of acoustics for us is pretty important in terms of songwriting. I mean we spent a lot of time sitting around writing acoustically before we’d even pick up the electric stuff."

Go to this location for the complete interview.

As previously reported, Jane's Addiction will close out 2010 with a pair of shows in Aspen, CO on December 30th and 31st at Belly Up. Tickets are available via JanesAddiction.com.

While the opening act has yet to be announced; the same holds true for the identity of the Jane's Addiction bass player. Duff McKagan (GN'R, VELVET REVOLVER, LOADED) left the band at the beginning of September after a mere five months with the group.