“The most difficult”: Josh Homme on the hardest song Queens of the Stone Age made
There’s no definitive approach to crafting a song in the studio. While critics often insist there’s a clear right and wrong when it comes to rock’s greatest hits, the truth is no one knows precisely what they want until they hear it. Many legendary acts have thrived by creating rock and roll songs that defy traditional structures. Despite Josh Homme’s history of venturing into unconventional musical territory, he found ‘The Way You Used to Do’ to be one of the most challenging Queens of the Stone Age tracks to unravel.
It’s not like any of QOTSA’s biggest tunes were exactly walks in the park initially, though. Their entire appeal seems to be centred on luring the listener into something of a trance whenever they perform, but as soon as the solo yanks everyone out of their musical high, people start to realise that the group knows how to flip on a dime and make something no one had ever heard before.
And Homme was never short on going down in progressive directions, either. Listening back to greatest records, many of the group’s best moments come when they work in strange time signatures, like the sweeping barrage of horns at the end of ‘I Think I Lost My Headache’ or the driving energy of ‘Hanging Tree’.
If anything, the idea of an entire album working with Mark Ronson should have been considered tame by comparison. Sure, he had been the mastermind known for putting together Amy Winehouse’s best material and working with legends like Paul McCartney, but seeing the stoner-rock giants getting in touch with their danceable side was going to be a bit more of a challenge once ‘The Way You Used To Do’.
And what’s crazier is how well it actually works. Most people went down the dance-rock route in the 1970s and lost all their credibility for a while (just ask Rod Stewart), but given the infectious riff and Homme’s delivery, this feels like an honest-to-God funk song that just happens to be played by one of the greatest hard rock outfits in the world.
That’s not to say that Homme would get off easy when it came time to play the track live, telling Guitar World, “The most difficult song that we’ve ever had to play is our single, ‘The Way You Used to Do.’ It’s a fuckin’ nightmare. I don’t know what it is. To sing and play with that sort of tightness is really demanding.”
Granted, it’s questionable how much of those challenges came from them having to calibrate how they worked together. Every one of Queens’s previous records was about the group gelling together to make one coherent sound, but now it was more about singling out every single player. Since it now felt like watching a jam session, unsticking from each other just a little bit may have been one of the biggest hurdles.
While it was a different flavour of Homme’s signature desert rock sound, it was not a downgrade either. This was just another case of Queens of the Stone Age pulling another style out of their bag of tricks, and considering how well this works, it wouldn’t shock me if they could turn traditional polka music into one of the best rock tunes they ever made.
