One of the greatest rock sidemen of the last two decades is dead.

With Trust No One, Dave Navarro steps out on his own for the first time, emerging as one of the most significant new solo artists of the 21st century after having carved out a legendary reputation as a showman and guitarist with Jane's Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Though known as one of the best axemen of the last dozen years, Navarro's first solo project is not the guitar-hero album that fans may have expected. Instead, it is a deeply personal reflection on love and loss that features Navarro on vocals, bass, guitar, piano, and some programming.

Navarro began the album in 1998, while the Chili Peppers were on hiatus. With just piano and acoustic guitar, he began to find expression for a dark period in his life that, month by month, kept getting darker. He parted ways with the Peppers and, after a brief reunion tour with Jane's Addiction, found himself alone at home: no bands, no girlfriend, no life to speak of, and all his relationships, with friends and family, were dissolving. The result was a tremendous outpouring of creativity: he designed his own complex website, filmed his own music videos, created all sorts of computer and sculptural artwork, and obsessively worked on the songs that would become Trust No One. In that time, Trent Reznor asked Navarro to record with Nine Inch Nails and Axl Rose asked him to replace Slash in Guns N' Roses. But Navarro would not stray from his task.

"I needed to exorcise my darkness," he said, "because that's not the way I want to walk through the world. When I'm happy, I don't necessarily need to find a way to get that out of my system. I just want to experience it. So the record deals with my misperceptions regarding love and relationships, and through the exploration of those misconceptions I've come out on the other side with a whole different outlook."

Trust No One begins with the single "Rexall", a slow-building, heart-rending cry for help named after the pharmacy in Los Angeles where his parents met. Navarro gets more specific on "Mourning Son", which, he explains, is "just me dealing with the loss of my mother, which is a pivotal part of where my initial issues involving trust come from because she was killed by someone I trusted. That led me to believe that even people close to you are capable of the most inconceivable things."

Despite the darkness of the themes, the album moves through many moods and colors, full of sudden dynamic shifts, hard-driving rock, swatches of ethereal ambience, dozens of hummable melodies in a single song, and so many different layers and sounds in some tracks that headphones are necessary.

The album and title, Navarro says, aren't meant to be taken cynically. They are simply a reflection of a time of darkness and self-masochism, one reason for a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs", a song inspired by the masochistic fiction classic of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. "The ultimate message of the record is one to myself," Navarro says. "Yeah, I can focus on all this darkness, but the reality is that I'm going to miss any potential for light in doing so."

That's why the album ends on a note of lightness, "Slow Motion Sickness". Where earlier on the album Navarro lashes out and blames others for betraying and abandoning him, here he looks inward and accepts responsibility for the first time, ending the album with a coda, sung in high Beach Boys-like harmony, "Sometimes I don't feel so good."