The one album Josh Homme said was painful to make: “I pray to the god of rock ’n’ roll”
Everything that Josh Homme made usually had to come from a place of fun before anything else.
He didn’t get into the business for everything to feel like work all the time, and even by the time that Kyuss started blowing up a little bit, Homme wanted to cut it off at a certain point to make sure that it didn’t start getting stale. That’s half the reason Queens of the Stone Age kept rotating their lineup back in the day, but some songs were bound to be a bit more difficult than others once they walked into the studio.
It wasn’t really clear after their first record whether or not QOTSA was going to be a classic band or another project for Homme, but Rated R really broke down the barriers for what he wanted the group to be. He had the idea of them being as unconventional as possible, and while Songs for the Deaf did put them on the map a lot more with Dave Grohl behind the drum kit, there was no way that band could have been sustained.
Anyone else would have killed to have partners like Grohl and Mark Lanegan on vocals, but after a few shakeups, Lullabies to Paralyse was always going to be a transitional record. Homme had never really settled into his role as a proper frontman before, and while the album still stands as a decent record, all things considered, you could still feel a little bit of that discomfort on Era Vulgaris.
That was the band’s opportunity to get a little bit weird, but even with a lot of great music like ‘Make it With Chu’, …Like Clockwork was the first time where the band felt like a well-oiled machine. Every single guest on the record brought their A-game, and Homme was in fine form, but most people didn’t expect him to have a few brushes with death in order to get the whole thing off the ground again.
Homme had already gone through an operation that came close to killing him multiple times, but by the time he was fully recuperated, he wasn’t reacting to music like he used to. The biggest songs in his arsenal were still there, but even when tunes like ‘My God is the Sun’ and ‘Smooth Sailing’ started spilling out of him, Homme felt like the whole process was like pulling teeth after a while.
He wanted a chance to get back into making music, but he swore never to get back into that headspace ever again, saying, “This new album was very taxing. Is it gonna be like that all the time? I pray to the god of rock’n’roll that this is not my new style. Because: Nope. I’ve always been able to enjoy what this is and I’d hate to lose the key to that. The alternative is you become a curmudgeon. I’d like to think that my final words will be a giggle.”
If he is indeed a curmudgeon about rock and roll, though, he’s rarely shown it ever since then. His guest spots working with other artists like Iggy Pop was bound to set his world on fire all over again, and when listening to the music that he was making on everything from Villains to In Times New Roman…, he was still making the kind of songs that gave him the rush that they did when he first got started.
Because as far as he was concerned, staying true to himself was all that mattered in the long run. It took him a while to put himself back together after his brush with mortality, but …Like Clockwork hardly ever sounds like it was difficult to make. If anything, this was a victory lap for Homme that he could still pull himself out of his darkest moments and make kickass rock and roll.
