“It sounds better”: Josh Homme on the one band that never got old
One of the biggest hurdles that any band has to overcome is the passage of time. The entire appeal behind any song is how well it works the moment it was recorded, and since life is unpredictable, who knows whether that tune is going to be relevant in ten years or have the shelf life of the cheese in the back of the fridge that everyone forgot was there. While Josh Homme has tried to keep most of his material fairly universal in whatever project he’s working on, he admitted that there was a certain magic to records that keep getting better every time he listens to them.
But the greatest albums of all time are usually the ones that keep people listening for different eccentricities in the music. Most people aren’t going to pick up on every single detail in a Yes album the first time they hear it, and part of the joy behind revisiting albums like Close to The Edge is focusing on a singular instrument and seeing what Chris Squire can do on his own without the rest of the band.
Even when listening to some of Homme’s albums, like Songs for the Deaf, part of the appeal is hearing all of the goofy mock radio skits that the band inserts between every song. But even when talking about the timeless records of the 1960s, there was a certain something that happened whenever a band like Creedence Clearwater Revival came on.
Because, really, John Fogerty’s band seemed like the last group that anyone would pick to become famous. They seemed to look like any average blue-collar worker and/or lumberjack trying to make it in their hometown, but that was the whole point. Not every band needed to look like a hippy back in the day to succeed, and listening back to some of Fogerty’s best material, chances are any window dressing would have got in the way of the songs.
Listening to tracks like ‘Proud Mary’ or ‘Lookin’ Out My Back Door’ always conjured up images of someone rocking away on their porch jamming on an acoustic guitar, but CCR were always more than a singles band. In fact, deep cuts like ‘Keep On Chooglin’ or having the gall to open up Cosmo’s Factory with something like ‘Ramble Tamble’ was far from their image as a “singles act” thrust on them by the critics.
And while Homme’s music might sound remotely like Fogerty’s, he could still appreciate the sheer craft on display, saying, “When you listen to a Creedence Clearwater Revival album, it sounds better and more current than a current album, in my opinion. It’s natural, it’s timeless and its tonality sounds great as you turn it up or even when it’s down. Those are the key factors to great production value in my mind.”
It’s hard to really argue with that timelessness, too. Even if some of the production values might sound a bit retro from a pure fidelity point of view, tunes like ‘Fortunate Son’ feel even more pertinent today, even if some people haven’t been able to learn the lesson of that song over the half-century it’s been out.
But longevity is never something that someone should focus on when they are starting out. Fogerty only knew that he could write about what was around him, and even if he tried to be the best for his time, the world still hasn’t grown tired of ‘Proud Mary’ or ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain’.
