Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme: the fragility of a tough guy | Culture

He is a tough guy, really, a small universe of variable sensitivity who goes everywhere with a notebook in which he writes more poems than songs. “I write poems, but I don’t consider myself a poet,” he said while taking a sip of his beer. It was the afternoon of June 26, the day his band, Queens of the Stone Age, closed their generous Spanish tour—five cities in just one week: A Coruña, Madrid, Vitoria, Fuengirola and Barcelona—and Josh Homme (Palm Springs, California, 51 years old) appeared euphorically calm. No one could have imagined then that 15 days later, on July 10, Homme would be admitted for emergency surgery, or that, to this day, he would continue under medical supervision without anything more being known about his health than the fact that he cannot, for the moment, go back on stage. Because each and every one of the remaining concerts of the European tour have been cancelled, one by one.

That day, June 26, he said he was happy and at peace. He also said that the tour he was on was a celebratory tour because “the last five years have been hellish.” “But we have survived,” he also said. Homme had revealed not long before, that same June, that the previous year he had undergone surgery to treat a cancer about which nothing is known yet. The only thing that is known is what he said: that the operation had been a success and that everything was going well. Perhaps that is why, that June afternoon, he seemed so euphorically calm. He talked a lot about Spain. He said that Spain was, by far, his favorite country in the world. “I feel at home, and at the same time, very lucky whenever I am here. There is something about the landscape, in the interior, that reminds me of my homeland. And then there is everything else. It is paradise,” he commented.

He really meant it. He would like to live here. The problem is that his family is huge. “I live with my parents, and my three children. In fact, we all live less than five minutes away. There is also my brother and his husband. I would like to see them all here,” he explained. And when he said here, he actually meant Llafranch, or a similar place, on the Costa Brava, where about “15 or 17 years ago” he spent 10 days with the band “and their families” and where he felt that time stood still. There is something dreamy in the look of the Homme who does not hold a guitar — on stage, there is no one more muscular than him. rockereither stone rockerwhich he and his band—, and it is something that has to do with a new and hopeful beginning, now in doubt, after those five hellish years. The years in which his marriage broke up, and in which Mark Lanegan (a good friend and former member of Queens of the Stone Age) and Taylor Hawkins, the drummer of Foo Fighters, also a friend, have died.

Homme, sunglasses, white shirt, slightly greased hair, pleasant perfume and calm, above all, calm, he preferred not to talk about his altercations: the three years of forced labor for a fight with Blag Dahlia, a friend of Nick Oliveri, a former member of the band, in a bar. He spoke of In New Times Romantheir latest album —the group’s eighth, the closing of the trilogy that began with Like Clockwork (in 2013)—, about which he stated that, like any good album, “it should capture what you felt at the time you were composing it; in the end, that’s what albums are, a moment, a few years of your life.” Yes, it is a return to the roots of that powerful, imperturbable, pure and, today, banned, or impossible rock, but it is also everything he has managed to decipher, up to now, about himself. “I see music as a path. Art itself is a path. All we do is follow it,” he explained.

He quoted Winston Churchill when he said that “if you go through hell, don’t stop, keep walking”, and Oscar Wilde, whom he said was “a grumpy little madwoman”, when he added: “Be yourself, everyone else is caught.” And he even pointed out that the creator spends his life trying to fix something that is broken. insidebut he knows that it will never fix anything. “The recording was hard, as hard as the album is. You can tell we were fighting for something, but we always are, really. I always feel that way. Music is my therapist, it has been my guide all these years. When I look for an answer, it always gives me one. Or it gives me something close to an answer. I have a lot of ups and downs in my life. But music is always there. Like a kind of father,” he confesses. Are there any ups and downs right now? No, he insisted. “Right now I am at peace,” he repeated. And he ordered another beer. “I think, like Nietzsche, that life without music would be a mistake.”

He said he read Cormac McCarthy and William Blake, and he said he always knew they would get this far and be “alone.” He was referring to the rock scene. To the very idea of ​​rock, which is dying out: “I still consider everything that has happened to me to be surreal. I wake up every day thinking that none of this is possible. All the concerts have sold out. Isn’t that a miracle? Sometimes I don’t understand what the world is about today. The feeling is that we are all some kind of project for something. A work in progress. That we need to get better, stop the chaos. But chaos matters. We are who we are. We’re not going to change.” He added: “You know, I actually felt more alone before, when we were surrounded by other rock bands. I don’t anymore. I knew we could outlive them all. And we were going to do it. There’s nothing wrong with wildness.”

The new masculinity

As a tough guy, or a perceived tough guy, how do you deal with the issue of new masculinity? Do you think it has anything to do with rock’s displacement from the mainstream scene? “I don’t know, all I know is that it’s important to be a man. But not in the sense that you think a man should be, but in the sense that you think you should be. I think that a man should above all be a good listener. Someone who above all listens. A great listener. And then someone capable of putting himself at risk for others. I believe in a sense of the masculine role, but also in someone who can exercise it because he knows and is at peace with his feminine side. I know that there are those who won’t share it, but I also know that one can lose oneself when one is not willing to know oneself, and when one doesn’t have a role,” he answered. Of course, he never thought it would be so hard. Not being a man, but the issue of music.

“My father used to say that when your job gets harder with age, you’ve chosen a bad job, or you’re not doing it right. And mine is getting harder, so maybe I didn’t choose well. Before, the music industry was a field of flowers. It was as easy to record an album as it was to go out and pick a bouquet. Now, the field is empty. There’s no way to find anything that could form a bouquet. Everything is more and more complicated,” he said. He had been in Barcelona for a couple of days and had done nothing but walk. Five-hour walks, completely anonymous — “yesterday someone went out to water the plants on the balcony and accidentally watered me, and it was wonderful!” he said, amused — that he hoped to repeat soon. “My Spanish is terrible — he has learned to say ‘de puta madre’ and not only that, he defends himself — but I’m sure that my children’s will be better,” he predicted.

The guy who grew up in Palm Springs, but not in the Palm Springs of houses with swimming pools, but one where the parents worked in room service at some motel – at least, his, for a while – and who left high school at 16, and fell in love with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd records, and knew that there was no other path for him than being on stage, breaks with the idea that a band is a constant, hurtful, fatal clash of egos. He assured that, despite everything – despite the unfortunate end with Oliveri, and the constant mutation of Queens of the Stone Age – “we are like a family”, and a necessarily united one. That, in fact, “I have learned to relate to my own family thanks to the band.” “In the end, I got into this to connect with the world, and here I am,” he concluded. And he asked for one last beer, because, “well, I’ve been able to handle two, why wouldn’t I be able to handle a third?”