ON UNITING WEIRDOS AND CONFUSING FANS
Queens of the Stone Age has changed it up again on new album Villains, and frontman is gleefully braced for ‘blowback’
Queens of the Stone Age is one of the most popular rock bands on the planet and yet its courtship of the mainstream remains entirely on its own terms.
No two Queens albums have followed the same plot and despite the band’s willingness to coyly deploy a sticky pop hook as radio bait every now and then, its catalogue on the whole is eccentric, uncompromising and almost designed to separate the diehards from the fairweather fans.
One gets the sense that bandleader Josh Homme et al. derive great pleasure from not making it easy on their audience.
Nevertheless, Queens of the Stone Age scored a No. 1 album in six territories, including the U.S., with 2013’s dark-hued
. . . Like Clockwork — it made it to No. 2 here in Canada — and they’ll be playing Toronto’s 16,000-capacity Budweiser Stage on Sept. 9. So clearly, after 20 years in the game, they’re still doing something right.
Their commitment to pushing forward into uncharted musical territories continues apace, too, with their forthcoming seventh album, Villains, due in stores on Aug. 25. Produced by Mark Ronson — more typically associated with the likes of Bruno Mars, Amy Winehouse, Adele and Lily Allen than thunderously heavy hardrock acts — it’s a return to the choppy, rhythmically capricious mechano-rock trickiness of 2007’s Era Vulgaris, this time with a surprising amount of synths and some dour Bowie-in-Berlin-isms left over from Post-Pop Depression, the excellent album Homme and some of his Queens bandmates made with Iggy Pop last year.
The Star spoke to the always entertaining Homme last week and he was already gleefully braced for the fallout from Villains. Man, I like that you guys are still capable of surprising me seven albums in. I feel you really work at making sure each album is not just a pale rehash of the past and I thank you for that, because it keeps things interesting.
I appreciate that. I feel like it’s healthy for me not to read about myself so I guess my gauge of what people feel is more concert-based, and I think I don’t read about stuff because I always feel the white-hot disdain. I just assume that the internet is full of naysaying so I ignore that, so I’m not always sure if someone understands how much thought gets put into “All right, how are we going to play Whack-a-Mole and turn up in a spot without getting hit,” you know? Because that just feels like one of the most important starting points for all this: how do we turn up playing Whack-a-Mole and not be hit by somebody? And I’m never sure if people understand how important it is to us to really try to surprise people. We look at this as a good thing, not a bad thing. A friend just asked me about the new album and I told him it makes perfect sense if you’ve been listening all along, and especially if you take the Iggy album into account. I can hear where the new stuff is coming from, but it’s definitely a product of where your heads are at in the moment, eh?
I think each time, realistically, we probably have about three or four options that we could go to, which is a fair amount of choice to begin with. And I do think what you said is as accurate as humanly possible.
If you were to stand behind us and look from our perspective, you’d probably see one arrow arc. It wouldn’t look like it was jumping around, it would look like one fluid arc. And that would make sense. I realize, too, that each time we roll these dice we might be losing somebody. I had this conversation with Ronson at the very beginning. He was talking about the response to this record before we even made it, just on his name alone. Well, that’s where the hating starts, right there.
Yeah and it’s so deliberate. It is the absolute, first reason that I was like, “We gotta ask Ronson.” Because of the blowback. I don’t know why I’ve always searched for blowback, especially blowback that is created by us to set a low bar so we can come in behind you and say “We’re the ones playing Whack-a-Mole and you’ve done been whacked.” You know what I mean? Maybe it’s just a chip on my shoulder, I don’t know, but I’ve stopped trying to figure out what it is and instead just trust the chip. Instead of examining “What is this on my shoulder?” I’m just, like, “Oh, that’s the thing that leads us around.” Because I do feel like this is my job: I’m supposed to surprise and confuse a little and excite that which leads to excitement, which leads to the joy of being surprised. I actually think Ronson is a far more logical fit for Queens than outwardly he might appear, and I’m sure you would agree or you wouldn’t have invited him into the studio.
I felt that the immediate downside would be people saying, “He ruined the band” without even hearing anything, you know? They might use it as ammo to decry whatever they heard first, as proof. And then they might say, “These guys just want to be huge. That’s their goal.” And I thought this would be a really funny and beautiful start because there’s something about that back-andforth.
Now, the truth of the matter is he knows who produced all these records — who was the engineer, what studio they worked in — and he’s such a music-phile, and he sort of understands what the recipe was in making all of these records that are his favourite records and it’s a wide, wide breadth of music that he really loves. And he’s so beat-centric. And all of that is such an overlap to what we are.
Also, he never made any bones about being a fan of our music and so I thought that’s someone who’ll have his best foot forward at all times. And even more than that, then you realize this guy’s a great communicator. He’s funny, he’s excited, he’s passionate. When he hears a good idea, he’s the first guy to jump up and down. And when he hears something and we’re all on the fence, and we’re having this discussion, he’s not afraid to say “Wow, that was terrible.” Those are my words. His are more “with a spoonful of sugar,” but it’s not dishonest, you know? He’s a very honest communicator.
So the overlap was really intense and makes total sense. But I like the easiness of, “You just wanna get big and you wanna make hits.” As if that was ever it. I think everyone has their own yardstick for how well something does and sometimes the audience as the yardstick is very entertaining for me. You’ve played arenas here and you’ve had a No. 1 album. You’re already big. It’s already happened. What are people griping about?
I still think of us as outsiders. So if we’re doing well it’s because the outside is a great, silent majority that is willing to let us do it our way. There are certainly enough weirdos to fill a hockey rink up here.
There are more weirdos than people brushing their hair 10,000 times each day, so I’m proud of uniting weirdness under one banner every once in awhile. And I think it’s also been important to sort of attempt to “prune,” you know, to do your best to try to leave a racist, misogynist, homophobic bully out. I feel like there’s been this notion of trying to protect people’s abilities to be themselves within that weirdness.