Josh Homme’s favourite albums of all time
The eclectic mix of music that goes into the style of Josh Homme comes from across the world of music. From the Master of Reality doom metal days of Black Sabbath to the high-energy Milo Goes to College sound of the Descendents, Homme is basically a one-man encyclopedia of music, especially genres that favour loud guitars and pounding drums.
When Homme sat down with Spin in 2003 to detail the albums that shaped his life, there were some obvious choices. For example, you’d expect someone like Homme to be well-versed in old-school punk rock. And he is: from Black Flag’s My War to GBH’s City Baby Attacked by Rats, Homme’s punk rock bona fides are obvious. But his first musical love wasn’t punk – it was singer-songwriter Jackson Browne.
“I discovered Running on Empty when I was eight. It was a fixture with my old man, and it still is,” Homme explained. “I was into the fact that it’s all about the road. It’s like the school of hard-rockin’, except it’s not hard and it isn’t rockin’. I look back on the hundreds of times I’ve heard it, and I realize I’m cursed to live on the road as well. But it’s a beautiful curse.”
Like a lot of impressionable young people in the early 1990s, Homme was a devoted Nirvana fan. But when he had to pick one of the band’s three studio albums, he didn’t go with Nevermind or In Utero. Instead, the record that really spoke to a then-teenaged Homme was Bleach, the band’s raw and ragged debut for Sub Pop.
“By 1989, it seemed like punk rock had sort of died, and I thought Nirvana were picking up where Black Flag and GBH had left off,” Homme explained. “I remember thinking I didn’t want my band to sound anything like Nirvana because they had set the bar so high. I didn’t want to get too close.”
For the rest of his life, Homme went to work fusing different genres and making his own kind of rock music. Initially playing with the California desert stoner rockers Kyuss, Homme decided to strike out on his own in the late 1990s with Queens of the Stone Age, the project when Homme remains the creative leader. But Homme has also had the opportunity to play with some of his heroes, including his time with The Stooges singer Iggy Pop in the late 2010s.
“I heard Lust for Life, and it actually made me quit Kyuss,” Homme claimed. “I listened to it obsessively for two and a half years, and at the end I thought, ‘There are just way too many bands out there, and if you want to know what I have to say, just listen to this record. It’s all here.’ I sort of went backward with Iggy Pop, and eventually I got to the Stooges’ Raw Power, which I still think is the craziest-sounding record ever. Take any band that says they’re raw, play them Raw Power, and they’ll sound like the biggest pussies of all time.”
It wasn’t just Iggy Pop who opened up Homme’s musical tastes. In his list of favourite albums, Homme made sure to make room for some unexpected nominations, like Can’s Cannibalism and Björk’s Homogenic. But if there was one album that truly opened the doors to high-concept weirdness, it was Pennsylvania experimental rock duo Ween and their killer 1995 album Chocolate and Cheese.
“I think Ween are so underrated. They have a casual arrogance and a disrespect for genres,” Homme proclaimed. “Chocolate and Cheese has lots of eclectic, schizo songwriting jumps, but Ween never say, ‘We’re just kidding.’ The realization that they’re not joking was very frightening at first. They used to be on Elektra like Kyuss were, and we both had this philosophy of ‘Let’s take all the money they’ll foolishly give us.’”
Josh Homme’s favourite albums:
- Jackson Browne – Running on Empty
- Various Artists – Eastern Front, Vol. II
- GBH – City Baby Attacked by Rats
- Black Flag – My War
- Nirvana – Bleach
- Iggy Pop – Lust For Life
- Can – Cannibalism
- Björk – Homogenic
- Ween – Chocolate and Cheese
