“No end in sight”: The records Josh Homme struggled to record
The live stage should be a band’s bread and butter. Unless you’re born into the world of high-brow recording, it’s the stage where you learn your craft. It’s where the songs you’ve spent painstakingly writing in your make-shift rehearsal studio are fleshed out, and in the early stages of your career, they stay that way until you’re offered the privilege of real studio time. But there’s something about Josh Homme that feels slightly different.
It’s almost as though he left the womb with one hand on the control board of the studio. After all, it was his experimental setup in the desert that altered the course of Arctic Monkeys history, on their third album Humbug. He has an acute understanding of how a song can develop from it idea infancy into something larger and has in turn become somewhat of a studio master.
But let’s remember what it was that got us off our sofas and into dingy pubs in the first place. The music, the live show, the fully formed song right in front of our eyes. Of course, I love an experimental masterclass as much as the next person, but I like a song more than I like an idea. And so in light of that, sometimes the studio can be an albatross around the neck, preventing the fruition of an entire idea.
But for Homme, the delineation between the two is somewhat of a natural process. In the very writing of the song, he is informed what songs will be a labour of love and what can be instantly designed, with a path of creativity laid out in front of it.
He explained, “I feel like Songs for the Deaf‘s ‘Go with the Flow’ or Lullabies to Paralyze‘s ‘Long Slow Goodbye’ are very direct songs. But with those records, I could see the end goal before we started.”
But in 2013, when Queens of the Stone Age worked on …Like Clockwork, Homme’s efficiency was hampered, not by an obsession for creative perfection but rather circumstance, and a rather frightening one at that. During a surgic procedure for his leg, Homme experienced complications that resulted in him almost dying in theatre. A moment he has understandably considered a turning point in his creative life, explaining that his ability to innately hear music or creative ideas had been completely lost in the aftermath.
The studio soon turned from a place of solace to intimidation, rendering him purposeless to an extent, in a place where his ability was consistently questioned. He explained, “It’s just different this time for the band. Chris Lombardi told me that this is Act Two of Queens of the Stone Age, and I agree with that. Act Two just happened to start with me waking up in a hospital. I’m not complaining, but I do kind of wish it had started in a different way. I’ve always thought of music as separate from reality, but there’s no escaping the reality of where this album started. I had no choice but to deal with it.”
But somewhere, in the vastly different Homme, existed that same kernel of creative genius and in …Like Clockwork he turned his new-found situation into pivoted greatness. An album that could stand proudly next to the rest, and one that turned dark uncertainty into sonic expression.
