JOSH HOMME: 'I Loved Playing With JOHN GARCIA Again'

The RekordsRekords.com web site has been updated wit ha brand-new e-mail interview with QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE/ex-KYUSS mainman Josh Homme. A couple of excerpts from the question-and-answer session follow:

Q: How was it playing with John Garcia [ex-KYUSS singer] again? I've seen the videos from the Wiltern show [in L.A. in late December] and it looked like the band had a great time! Was it weird at first? Did you notice the crowd reaction?

Josh Homme: "Man, I loved playing with John again. I can't believe how long it had actually been since we'd last done stuff. Like ten years. Actually more than. I didn't notice the time pass. I just blinked. The band and Johnny had a great time. If the video shows our faces, then I'm sure all you can see is, like, smiles of relief. It was almost like testing a rope bridge and not knowing if it would hold or fall apart. But, once we knew it would hold we were, like, bouncin' up and down on it. Johnny and I have always been tight, even if we've had moments where ya don't talk for 8 months or somethin'. We just kinda pick up from where we left off. What's funny is, it felt like that's what we did with playin' too, just picked up from where we left off. It made me feel good and I needed that. It was a great way to end the year. I breathed a sigh of relief at the reaction it got from everyone else in the jury box. dude, with all the spin and twist, bleep and blaap that's gone on for the last year and a half, I thought, 'Well, this could be received horribly wrong.' But it wasn't misunderstood by KYUSS or QUEENS people, so it gets accepted for what it was: two old friends playing together, just because."

Q: After so many years of touring, recording and non-stop promotion, are you glad to have a bit of free time or are you itching to get back into the studio?

Josh Homme: "I'm always itching to get in the studio. But, I'm glad to have a little time to reflect and observe and learn some new shit. I like to do stuff, it's hard not to when you get to be a musician. When I sit for too long, I get this nervous feeling that music will take itself away from me. So I try to: water it, listen to it, talk to it, leave it alone for a second (you know, give it some privacy),then put it in the sun for awhile, worship it, try it on, curse it, feed it, beg from it and grow it in order to skip things like copying it or chasing it. No static things. I feel like certain aspects of writing have the same dynamic as a relationship with someone else. Like, you can't spend every minute of every day with the same person or what do you have to communicate about, they were there and two now operate as one. I gotta go out, discover and learn things, that are worth bringing back to camp. Takin' chances, tripping, falling and eating a lot of shit is a great way for me to change my perspective or angle that I look at the world. Getting up again is the greatest way I know of testing how much I really learned. So, based on my shit eating intake, I guess you could say that I learned a lot this year (hahaha!). Whatever… I'll just wait for music to call me and tell me it's arrived and is ready to be picked up at the station. Then I guess I'll do what I know to do: go pick it up and bring it back home."

Q: With "Lullabies", it seems the record took a more emotional direction, with songs like "I Never Came" and "The Blood is Love" having a poignancy that is mostly unheard of on previous releases. I love the surprises that this record brought, the diversity is even more apparent on this CD. Did you realize that it would lead to division amongst some of the fans?

Josh Homme: "It's been intense. I knew I was walking into a situation where I could not make everybody happy and before we'd even started recording the unhappy people were so vocal about how they felt. But I hadn't really said why I had done what I'd done with Mark [Lanegan] and Nick [Oliveri], so that question got answered by rumor and by an angry Nick. Music has saved me so many times before and I didn't wanna say 'Nick is violent with the ladies and Mark is gonna die without help. I'm not on my own 'cause I wanna be, but because I don't have a choice. Now forget all that, 'cause here's the new QUEENS record!' In hindsight, I was naive. Sometimes words make me feel like I'm trying to do calligraphy with a brick. Music communicates intangible, complex feelings where words fail. So yeah, I sorta stupidly thought I'd play my way out of the mess I was in. 'I Never Came' is about life knocking you down until you're ready to give up, but finding a way to rise up again. And 'The Blood..' is about looking into the eyes of someone you care about as they pass away and it's what I said to a special person right after they were gone. When we'd finished recording 'Lullabies', I was confident that everyone would hear honesty and know it was real. I thought nay-sayers would respect that it doesn't hide the emotions of the moment and that its sound is all three records rolled into one. But, by the time it finally came out, I think lots of people had made up their minds. Everyone wanted it to be exactly what they wanted it to be or else. I wouldn't change one note. Albums should be a historical record of their time frames, right? Isn't that why they're called records? 'Lullabies' is what was goin' on for me."

Read the entire interview at www.rekordsrekords.com.