“It’s crushingly beautiful”: Josh Homme picks his ideal funeral song
In the early 1990s, Josh Homme trailblazed the desert rock scene with his formative band Kyuss. Potent strains of grunge were noticeable in the band’s genetic makeup, inspired by Homme and his bandmates’ deep admiration for stalwarts like Nirvana and Mark Lanegan’s Screaming Trees. When Homme left Kyuss in 1995, he was delighted to be welcomed to join Screaming Trees as their rhythm guitarist for the summer Lollapalooza tour of ’96.
During this period, Homme and Lanegan became particularly close as mutual admirers and drinking buddies. However, Homme may have stayed with Screaming Trees for a little longer had he and Lanegan not had a few disagreements. Fortunately, the pair realised their respective vocations of leading a band a piece. While maintaining a close friendship, Homme split off to form Gamma Ray, the group that would soon morph into Queens of the Stone Age.
Although they took positions as frontmen of separate bands, Homme and Lanegan couldn’t seem to stay apart for too long. In 2000, the Screaming Trees frontman appeared on Queens of the Stone Age’s transitional album, Rated R, offering his iconic, rusty vocals to ‘Leg of Lamb’, ‘Autopilot’, and ‘I Think I Lost My Headache’. The album’s commercial and critical success left a door open for Lanegan to join Queens of the Stone Age as a full-time member, which he accepted after releasing his fifth solo album, Field Songs.
With Lanegan on board with more permanence, Queens of the Stone Age began work on their third studio album, Songs for the Deaf. The album was a landmark success, with the accessible hit single ‘No One Knows’ introducing the band to a wider audience and the rest of the album delivering a degree of consistency apt to make this the band’s enduring masterpiece.
Lanegan only remained with the band for one further album, Lullabies to Paralyze, but never strayed too far from Homme. Notably, in 2007, he contributed to ‘River in the Road’ and teamed up with Homme to celebrate their culinary hero, Anthony Bourdain, creating a theme tune for the celebrity chef’s programme Parts Unknown.
Naturally, when Lanegan passed away in February 2022, Homme was devastated. The news struck the musician during a phase of “self-imposed exile” as he came to terms with several deaths of those close to him. “In the last few years, I have mourned seven deaths, including those of people really close to me,” Homme told Visions at the time. Adding, “I wasn’t able to make music at that time… I wasn’t mentally or emotionally ready for it.”
Homme emerged from his “exile” in 2023 to release In Times New Roman…, the band’s first album in six years. The band accompanied the launch with an emphatic touring campaign, including a highly acclaimed show at Glastonbury.
Thankfully, Homme seems to be well-equipped to face the woes of mortality. Of course, music is a major part of his healing process, both in consumption and creation. In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly some five years before Lanegan’s death, Homme discussed his own fate, picking out one of his friend’s songs as a fitting goodbye soundtrack.
Selecting Lanegan’s 2004 solo track ‘One Hundred Days’ as his ideal funeral song, Homme described it as “crushingly beautiful.” Elaborating on his admiration, Homme said, “If Mark Lanegan sang about toothpaste, I’d wanna brush.”
As Homme suggests, Lanegan had a knack for emotive and affecting composition, and ‘One Hundred Days’ is a prime example of his tear-jerking ways. The deeply poetic verse explores feelings of lovelorn loneliness, and the mention of “twilight” suggests that time is running thin.
Listen to Mark Lanegan’s ‘One Hundred Days’ below.
