POST POP DEPRESSION

JOSH HOMME’s track by track breakdown.

BREAK INTO YOUR HEART

I didn’t try to arrange it – it just came out like this. I had a couple of words that were maybe what I thought of Iggy: womanising, ups and downs, drugs. I had “Take it all, take it all” – but he changed that to “Take it all, break it all, fake it all, steal it all, fail them all, touch them all”. I started getting the chills. That catalyst freed everybody.

GARDENIA

I had a bass-line I couldn’t get out of my head. And he responded to that immediately. He told me this story: “I was in San Francisco, with Allen Ginsberg, and there was this black stripper, Gardenia. She was beautiful, a lot of body. We were both going after her but I ended up hooking up with her. But she just wanted drugs at the end of the day. She was amazing…” And that’s the lyrics: “America’s greatest poet was ogling you all night”, that’s Ginsberg. The honesty of his love lyrics – it’s not wrapped in imagery, it’s not smoke in the air.

AMERICAN VALHALLA

We’d talked about how the ideal of Valhalla is cool because you have to actually do something full-on to get there, you couldn’t just blow yourself up and get in Valhalla – it doesn’t work like that. You have to be brave. Then we were like, “I wonder if there’s an American Valhalla…?” The vibraphone felt Roman, almost like opera. Here’s an icon coming to the later stages of his life, the creator of punk rock, who’s survived, and displayed a willingness to be himself in the face of great odds, in a band that was hated but spawned all the good bands. Those lyrics: “Lonely lonely deeds that no one sees/I’ve nothing but my name…” He’s facing mortality and sensing none of the stuff matters. To be part of that statement felt so wonderful.

IN THE LOBBY

I said to Matt and Dean: “I want you to hear and put your brain around ‘primitive’, ‘utilitarian’, with ‘efficiency’ stacked on top.” I was playing bass, and I said it sounds like lobby music from a swanky hotel in New York. I don’t know what type of music it is actually. It seems like a deep cut, but it could be my favourite thing. He sounds like a monster. He sounds like Frankenstein: “The longer the night the shorter my leash.” It’s fascinating watching him do lyrics. He writes them down, fast. Like, forget what sucks, we’ll concentrate on what’s good, we’ll get rid of that one later, but every blank is filled. Goddammit, that’s the way to do it. The amount of times I’ve been stuck with one blank line for months. It feels like a very collaborative song all round. The fruits of trusting each other.

SUNDAY

Sunday was the last song we recorded, and I thought because it’s so new it might take a couple hours. He sang the whole thing in 30 minutes, and I felt awful because I was like, “That’s it. What do I do now…?” The melody line seemed like the happiest thing I’ve ever played. And then I wanted to surprise him with the ending, where the girls join in – what would be impossible to see coming? “Got all I need and it is killing me – and you”. It seemed like the centrepiece… and now you’re descending.

VULTURE

He’s like, “I’ve got one.” So he played acoustic and sang, and that’s the take. We just built around it, but there’s something to that ricketiness and out-oftune-ness. It’s about putting the right frame around that picture. Vulture is the ultimate scarred-up opportunist, I love the sentiment. He sent me a video of him with his bird – he has a bird, Biggy. Biggy and Iggy. He’s singing and the bird’s squawking, it’s a good video. I like working with people and having this positive friction that sends something in a direction it would not have gone.

GERMAN DAYS

When he sent me the Lust For Life breakdown, I was thinking about Iggy living in West Berlin, in such a dramatic moment of history, and we talked about German culture, the Cabaret drama. There’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon, it’s Bugs with Elmer Fudd and they’re doing Wagner – “Kill the rabbit!” – and it’s so dramatic, but it’s funny. This song was the epitome of a primitive-native mix that we were talking about, and he just said, “This could be German Days”. It’s got the “Kill the rabbit!” drama. It’s confusingly jarring. But groovy as fuck.

CHOCOLATE

I had that riff for nine years. He really was attached to it, but I couldn’t hear it. He was hearing it like a soul song, almost like a Motown record. Once I let go of what I’d thought it should be for nine years, I heard what he was hearing. That lyric is so intense. “When your love of life is an empty beach, don’t cry/When your enemy has you in his reach, don’t die”. It’s so different for both he and I, too, a song like that. Those lyrics are hopeful, but so from that perspective.

PARAGUAY

When he played that, the lyrics killed me. “I just couldn’t take no more/Of whipping fools and keeping score”. The fact that the record ends with this song, where he’s going out to the jungle like Colonel Kurtz, seemed very fitting. Then I had this other part, like a slave chant, and all of a sudden he starts talking over it. We only played it five times, and he had five different rants, a very earnest go-fuck-yourself. Improvised. I was like, “Did you just tell whoever was listening to go and fuck off?!” We actually debated if that’s what we should do. Then I just said, “Yeah – it’s not like it’s from somebody that doesn’t matter.”