Queens Of The Stone Age have a new album at the end of this month and in the run up to the release of Perfecth, Josh Homme has sat down with Rick Beato for a chat.
Homme’s long-time compadre Dave Grohl is one of the guesting musicians on the record and, inevitably, Beato brought up the Foo Fighters man. “He’s so easy to play with, it’s kind of – it’s so easy that it’s really addictive,” Homme explained. “Because It doesn’t really matter what he sits behind. Of course, when he sits behind the drums it’s so musical. So, whatever you play on a song, he just does it back here and that feels so comfortable.”
“You play him a riff, and he’ll play that riff back at you on the drums. And then he’ll play a drum counter-melody that would have been a harmony going on, that’s being beaten out of it. That’s where the stuff is so inspiring. It’s sick.”
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Talking about his drum style, Homme said: “He does this very strange thing where everything is the same hardness. He can make a floor tom as loud as a snare and I’m always like, ‘What the fuck?'”
“Someone could say, ‘Well, he hits them all hard’, except when he’s doing it soft it’s the same too. So there’s this sonic consistency across all boundaries. He can just dial it up and dial it back.”
“One of my favourite things to do with him is push him until he’s almost frustrated,” Homme said. “Because all you have to do is go ‘well you could do that (part), you could add those (parts) together’. Watching him go ‘fuck’ and then (mimes just getting on with the job). I know if he goes ‘just give me five minutes’…” Homme then mimes being excited at the prospect of something really good.
There’s loads more that the two men cover: the sad demise of regional scenes in the US, how Homme made Songs For The Deaf a really loud album and how he gets his signature guitar tone.
Anyway, Perfecth, a nine-track album and Queens’ ninth album thus far, comes out on October 30.
