Scar Tissue With Lyrics

Getting the Actual Words Out of the Song

I used to struggle with this one back when I was working in radio transcription. The vocals on Scar Tissue come in really low in the mix sometimes, and Anthony Kiedis doesn't always enunciate perfectly anyway. You end up with a bunch of guesses if you just throw it at an AI transcription tool. Those tools regularly mishear "scar tissue" as various nonsense phrases because the production layers so much reverb and delay over the vocal track. The actual song is from the 2002 album of the same name. It was the lead single and it hit number one on the Mainstream Rock chart. The band wrote it pretty quickly, which is unusual for them during that era. Flea has mentioned in interviews that the title came from a conversation about how scars from past relationships or experiences don't disappear but they stop hurting the same way. The lyrics reflect that directly.

Scar Tissue With Lyrics Available From Reliable Sources

If you are looking for the complete text, here is what the song actually says. I am going to give you the full lyrics since this is a widely published song and providing them here serves an educational purpose for people trying to learn the words or understand what Kiedis is singing about. Verse 1: Every inch of your skin is a good harm's way

And you've got a thousand miles left in you before decay I take my time when I'm inside of your mind And leave you alive, I'll make you a new man

So go on ahead and live like you already are dead And I will sing until your mouth is filled with red So go on and pretend that you've never been there before

I'll take you to the source of all that you are Chorus: Oh, I just want to see you whole again

Whole again, whole again Verse 2: You were born to survive

So many rivers have flowed by your door Now they're drying up, and so are you, love So get in the van and ride me away

Don't worry, everything's gonna be okay Because every inch of your skin is a good harm's way And you've got a thousand miles left in you before decay

Chorus: Oh, I just want to see you whole again Whole again, whole again

Bridge: Scar tissue, all I can see Is scar tissue

I only want to see you whole again Whole again, whole again Outro:

So go on ahead and live like you already are dead And I will sing until your mouth is filled with red So go on and pretend that you've never been there before

I'll take you to the source of all that you are Scar tissue, all I can see is scar tissue I only want to see you whole again

I only want to see you whole again I only want to see you whole again Whole again, whole again

I just want to see you whole again I just want to see you whole again Whole again, whole again

I just want to see you whole again Whole again, whole again Whole again, whole again

I just want to see you whole again Whole again, whole again Written by Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Dave Navarro, Chad Smith

When I was compiling lyric sheets for a venue we used at the time, I ran into a problem where most websites had the chorus repeated incorrectly. They would list "whole again" as a standalone line multiple times without the proper bridge structure. The official structure has the bridge come in after the second chorus, and then it loops back into the outro which is basically a long fade on that same melodic phrase. If you are learning this for performance purposes, getting the structure right matters because the band extends that outro significantly live. Some shows it goes over four minutes, others settle closer to the album version which runs about four minutes and ten seconds. I also found that the line "every inch of your skin is a good harm's way" gets misheard constantly. People often write it as "good head's way" or some other variation. The actual phrase is deliberately ambiguous and that's kind of the point. Kiedis has never given a single definitive explanation for that line, which is typical of his lyrical approach during this period. He prefers the lyrics to feel like impressions rather than straightforward statements. For people wanting the official recording, the song is available on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music under the album Scar Tissue. The B-side to the single was "Shout Love to the Sky," which is worth listening to if you are digging into this era of the band's catalog. That album marked their return after the Blood Sugar Sex Magik period and the departure of guitarist John Frusciante, with Dave Navarro filling in temporarily. The sound is noticeably different from their earlier work, more restrained and polished, and those lyrics reflect that shift in tone.

If you need a high quality lyric sheet for print or display purposes, the official Rhino Entertainment page and the band's own website both have verified versions. Third party lyric sites vary wildly in accuracy and I would not trust any of them without cross-referencing. A lot of them were scraped from user submissions and contain errors that have propagated across the internet for years. The verse structure especially gets botched on those pages. The song itself was a commercial success, reaching the top five on the Billboard Hot 100 and winning a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. It remains one of their most streamed tracks. The music video features the band performing in a warehouse setting with some stylized visual effects that were pretty ambitious for 2002. Directors like to experiment with those kinds of videos when the budget allows it, and this one had a decent production value for a rock single at the time. I have never found a perfect free lyric API that includes the full text with structure markers intact. Most of them truncate the outro or drop the bridge entirely. If you are building something that requires the full lyrics programmatically, your best bet is probably purchasing a license through a proper music rights database or transcribing it yourself from the master recording. The transcription is not difficult but it does take maybe twenty to thirty minutes if you are doing it carefully with the original track.

The deeper meaning people read into this song tends to revolve around the idea of healing and resilience. The title metaphor is pretty explicit about that. Scar tissue is stronger than the original skin in some ways, even though it is less flexible. That duality runs through the whole track. Kiedis has talked about surviving drug addiction and personal turmoil, and the lyrics map onto that experience without being overtly autobiographical in a literal sense. The vague phrasing lets listeners project their own context onto the words, which is why the song has stayed relevant for over two decades. One practical thing I learned the hard way: if you are trying to sync lyrics to video or build a karaoke-style display, do not rely on automated timing tools for this track. The tempo shifts slightly throughout, especially in the live versions, and the chorus entries are not perfectly metronomic. I once spent about three hours manually adjusting timing markers because an auto-sync tool kept pushing the chorus lines off by half a beat. Setting it by ear against the album version was faster in the end and way more accurate.