The artist Josh Homme measures everything against: “Every one of those records is incredible”
From day one, Josh Homme was always drawn to songs outside the norm. Looking through half of Queens of the Stone Age’s discovery, there are a few hat tips to rock and roll’s past, but there are also a handful of moments where he will pull out something so wild that it would have fit perfectly on one of Iggy Pop’s classic records or a piece of droning feedback that lulled the listener into a trance. Homme prided himself on making things sound weird, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some mainstream songs that struck his fancy occasionally.
After all, no one gets into music strictly because they have some higher calling to play an instrument. Outside of all the window dressing, music is still supposed to be fun, and hearing a catchy tune on the radio was more than enough to get Homme dancing when he first started playing music in California.
And judging by where he’s gone later in his career, the more interesting moves he’s ever made have come from him embracing pop textures in his sound. ‘The Way You Used to Do’ is practically a dance song with Mark Ronson’s ear for production, and despite Era Vulgaris being the black sheep of the musical family in some cases, songs like ‘3s and 7s’ and ‘Make It Wit Chu’ are still fine pieces of pop-rock compared to everything else on the radio at the time.
In fact, a lot of Homme’s pop songs seem like traditional pop melodies with a bit of a sinister edge behind them. There are pieces of the guitar riffs that are indebted to the bluesy sounds of classic rock, but by taking out only a few notes and adding in some aggression, his songs transform from the kind of tune that you can listen to speeding down the highway to a track that you listen to in a beat-up Jeep as the summer sun beats down on you in the middle of the desert.
How Foreigner shaped Josh Homme’s approach to production
Not every one of his songs screams classic rock, but listening to the giants of the era, there are subtle hints of bands like Foreigner in his delivery. Yes, the band has been thrown into the same pile of dad rock bands that have included the likes of Kansas and Boston over the years, but listening to Lou Gramm’s voice on ‘Rev on the Red Line’ of Mick Jones’s fantastic guitar tone on ‘Feels Like the First Time’ is enough to put them beside the all-time greats.
And while Homme was a far more gritty artist by comparison, he always went back to Foreigner as the gold standard for production, saying, “It’s such a classic voice. It sings about rock and roll, which is not easy to do and stay fashionable. Plus, the production value on every one of those Foreigner records is incredible. I’ve been using that tight, dry 1970s handcrafted full sound that sounds so good on the radio as a litmus test for my recordings for years.”
The little production tricks are a bit more challenging to spot going from mainstream rock to stoner rock, but they are certainly there. ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ might not be the first thing that people think of as being an influence on Queens of the Stone Age, but if you were to take a track like ‘Blue Morning Blue Day’ and put it next to the guitar riff in ‘Monsters in the Parasol’, both guitars have the same kind of upfront quality that hits you like a smack in the face every time they’re played.
Above all else, the key factor that Homme is getting at is how good those tracks sound whenever they’re played on the radio. Most people simply couldn’t make something sound that pristine, but on nearly every one of Foreigner’s records, there’s always a moment on one of their albums where you will feel like you’re listening to one of the greatest rock and roll bands in the world.
