The “happiest” song Josh Homme ever wrote
For many years, Josh Homme has sat in the bleak expanse of Joshua Tree, churning out some of rock’s most memorable records. Be it as the visionary leader of Queens Of The Stone Age or the careful producer curating records for Arctic Monkeys, Royal Blood, and Iggy Pop; he has developed a distinctive style that fits the brooding mood of his desert home.
The origins of his style are somewhat unexpected for a man whose sonic identity has been largely associated with crunching distortion and sliding licks. However, in an interview with Matt Sweeney for Guitar Moves, Homme recounted the early days of his guitar lessons and specifically how his ability to play bar chords was built around Polka music.
“I took Polka lessons for two years,” he said before explaining that the Polka guitarist was “the guy who taught guitar in the desert”. While playing, Homme demonstrates how the “bop” of polka-style playing subconsciously creates a rhythmic undercurrent that we’ve now become so accustomed to in his music. QOSTA’s most recognisable hit, ‘No One Knows’, has the polka bounce coursing through its veins and Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Knee Socks’, which Homme produced as a similar spiky intonation in its melody.
It’s a somewhat innocent genre that Homme has twisted into a dark and brooding signature. So it comes as no surprise that picking the ‘happiest’ song of his discography left but a few scraps to choose from.
In 2016, Homme produced Iggy Pop’s record Post Pop Depression, sprinkling desert rock on top of Pop’s profoundly unique baritone vocals. It was an astonishing record of collaboration that saw Homme recruit fellow QOSTA member Dean Fertita while Arctic Monkeys’ Matt Helders anchored the band on drums. What followed was a record that put Pop’s avant-rock atmosphere in a post-modern setting, with plenty of delayed guitar lines and a pulsing rhythm section that bounces the record it from pillar to post.
The drum beat, in particular, shines during the A-side’s finishing track ‘Sunday’. Isolated at first, it marches the song forward to the Polka beat of Homme’s youth, inviting the rest of the instruments to join. After 8 bars, they willingly accept, with Fertitta’s bass creating a headwind for Homme’s rock-come-disco guitar line. It’s an achingly groovy instrumental that rolls out the red carpet for Pop’s vocals, lamenting the daily grind of modern life and the sunny respite a longing Sunday provides.
The song drives you towards a transcendent finish, concluding the record’s A-side with soft female backing vocals and a swirling string section that acts as the record’s vortex, transporting you from one world to another.
Speaking to Mojo about the track, Homme explained how the sunny disposition of its listening was very much present in its recording: “Sunday was the last song we recorded, and I thought because it’s so new, it might take a couple of hours. He sang the whole thing in 30 minutes, and I felt awful because I was like, ‘That’s it. What do I do now?’ The melody line seemed like the happiest thing I’ve ever played. And then I wanted to surprise him with the ending, where the girls join in – what would be impossible to see coming? ‘Got all I need, and it is killing me – and you.’ It seemed like the centrepiece… and now you’re descending.”
Like the record, it’s a track of contradictions. The rhythm is innately groovy, and the melody is indeed joyous, but the reprise is haunting, and the lyrics framed within the rest of the album are jarring in true Iggy Pop fashion.
While the overall record sees Pop take a more aggressive approach in disdain for modern society, Sunday wraps it up in a disco ball bow and lets the world off with nothing more than a scornful labelling of a ‘masquerade of recreation’. So for a producer like Homme, whose desert-inspired Polka usually exudes the joy of an abandoned circus and a vocalist like Pop, whose smile can only be seen on either side of a middle finger, ‘Sunday’ is, of course, the happiest it gets.
