Queens Of The Stone Age were going at it until well after witching hour and yet were still getting no closer to what they were looking for.
As drummer Jon Theodore remembers it, they had been trying to finish one of the more aggressive tracks from their forthcoming album, Perfecth, and it just wasn’t happening.
They were trying too hard. Music is like that. It’s mercurial. But just as they were about to call it quits, they got back into position and started playing. Something called them back into the room, and whether it was exhaustion or the drinks they’d had to loosen up, there was a kind of magic happening right there on the floor of the studio.
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As they called out ideas to one another, a song took shape. It would be titled Insignificant Other, and little did they know it at the time, but this lithe after-hours groover would become the centrepiece of their record, emotionally, spiritually and musically, especially in its embrace of imperfection.
“We recorded that song at the end of a full day of, like, hitting our heads against the wall,” says Theodore. “We were pretty frustrated. It was late. It was like two in the morning, a little drunk, just trying to blow off some steam. The lights were already out in the studio.
“We were all ready to leave. Some people had their jackets on. We went in there, and the riff started kicking around, and we just played a little and then, after a very short amount of time, we had a couple of parts.”
Frontman Josh Homme, who produced Perfecth alongside bassist Michael Shuman, has described Insignificant Other as “a song about distance”, a song about how relationships that were once the centre of your universe can just disappear, and what’s left of a person after that. It’s about “how someone can be your entire world only to simply vanish. And about the strange vertigo of being on the receiving end of that”.
And the song does have a strange vertigo to it, a wooziness befitting its creation. It is a little reminiscent of the Rolling Stones’ Miss You, smoky and confessional, the kind of song that plays well in low-lit bars with tasselled lamps on the table, or in dive bars illuminated in neon, a Hopper-esque green colouring everyone with a shade of melancholy.
The key to finding it was not to overwork it, or to finesse it to the point of perfection. Insignificant Other is the kind of song that slips through your fingers if you try to hold it too tight. You can hear the freedom.
“There’s interplay. It’s free. It’s loose,” says Theodore. “We were literally calling out the changes as we’re taping it, and later, we went to New Orleans and we tried to do this with better sounds and we couldn’t beat it, because the best thing about that is that is actually hearing the interplay between the people.”
It is the sound of a band listening to one another. That sounds like it should be a given but it’s not always the case.
“We were all just reacting and moving as a unit, which is obviously the foundation of jazz and improvisational music,” says Theodore. “You’re listening and moving together. So it instantly became very special. We tried it a few times and we were just calling the arrangement out as we went. No one really knew what we were doing, and we ended up getting it.”
Insignificant Other reminds us that rock ’n’ roll is a nocturnal enterprise. There is a vampiric quality to the track; you can’t come up with something like this when the sun is up. Besides, they had almost given up for the day. The song didn’t even exist until they started calling out the changes. Theodore says they could play without the weight of expectation.
“We were like, ‘Oh, this sounds great.’ But when you listen to it, it’s definitely all of us doing what we look like without any pressure, or any sense of, ‘You have to do this right, and in a particular way,’” he says. “We just did what we did. And we were listening very carefully. Like, you can hear the glue between us.”
As guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen joins us, he says it was approached in the same way as the Stones would have in the early ‘70s.
“If you know anything about the recording process for Exile On Main St. [the Stones’ 1972 classic], they just let the tape roll, and that was what we did with that song,” says Van Leeuwen. “I think we went over the arrangement once, it was late at night, and we were tracking to two-inch tape, and all five of us were in the room, and that’s the second take that you hear on the record. That feels like what the Stones might have done.”
Theodore describes Insignificant Other as a bridge between the past and present, where Queens Of The Stone Age have been, and where they are going. It’s the link to their “old life”. How could it not be, with its themes of estrangement and dislocation, and the black hole of relationship breakdown?
We’ve already heard the shambling, beautiful mess of Easy Street, a two-hander between Nikki Lane and Homme on vocals. Homme produced Lane’s last studio album, 2022’s Denim & Diamonds, and now she is repaying the favour. What comes next?
Well, those expecting Queens Of The Stone Age to make the same record twice have not been paying attention, but even so, Theodore promises Perfecth will catch many by surprise. “I would say this record is a pretty big departure in a lot of ways,” he says.
Expect the unexpected. But maybe in time we will look on Insignificant Other as the key to understanding this chapter in Queens Of The Stone Age history, a band haunted and inspired, who came out of the Catacombs beneath Paris somehow changed, with a greater appreciation of the liminal space between the living and the dead, and of how – all things considered – it is better to count yourself among the former.
“It’s a big part of the record for all of us,” says Van Leeuwen. “It says everything about our playing and it’s coming out of some of the dark personal and physical things that Josh had to go through. I think that we captured something really magical there – and there’s mistakes everywhere, and that’s part of it.”
Perfecth is available to pre-order and will be released on October 30 via Matador. In other QOTSA-related news, Troy Van Leeuwen’s signature Squier Telecaster XII has officially been released. It is one cool take on the Tele, and one of the coolest 12-string guitars you can buy for $599. See Fender for more details.
