QOTSA Tangled in New Songs
“This new stuff blows away Songs for the Deaf and any
other record we’ve made,” says Queens of the Stone Age frontman
Josh Homme, currently on tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers but
already prepping his band’s next release. “It’s almost like
Deaf was the end of something and this is a whole new
level. It’s more simple. It’s less complicated.”
So far Queens have twenty-five songs to choose from for their
fourth, as yet untitled effort, including “Skin on Skin,”
“Everybody Knows That You’re Insane” and “Tangled Up in Plaid.”
“It’s sort of about the cad and being the life of the party, but
the wrong life at the wrong party,” Homme says of the track. “It’s
kind of about raining on the parade a little bit, you know,
infiltrating to destroy.”
Homme will again produce his band’s new material, most of which
the quintet (which now includes drummer Joey Castillo) generated on
the road. “This isn’t Bon Jovi: ‘We’ve seen a million faces and
rocked them all,'” Homme quips. “There’s all sorts of experiences
that happen on the road that aren’t like that line. We live out
here, so it’s our lives out here. We stopped thinking of it as
we’re going somewhere — this is who we are. I’ve been on tour for
about eleven years. So I feel more like a scientist collecting
data.”
Though the band had hoped to hit the studio in October, Homme
says QOTSA are close to planning a major U.S. tour instead.
Following the jaunt, the band will then seclude themselves in
January to lay down tracks for the proposed spring 2004
release.
“I like to go and get isolated,” Homme says. “There’s a place
called the Site where we did parts of our last record. It’s about
thirty miles from the nearest freeway [and] an hour outside of San
Francisco. If you run out of smokes, you’re fucked. You have to
smoke a salmon or something.”