Queens of the Stone Age

The reception for the last album wasn’t as positive as the previous records, looking back now, do you think that album stands up to the earlier stuff?
I think it does. I think each record that Queens makes is a step in a direction that’s unknown to us, and we try to keep our audience abreast of what we’re doing but as artists and as players we’re always trying to break some ground. For us that record was an experiment in noise, and trying to make pop songs with noise. Some people think that Lullabies to Paralyze doesn’t measure up to other records, but that’s another record that people keep discovering. My point is that people always tend to discover things a little later. Maybe it’s not so instantaneous, but I still have peers and friends that go ‘Wow, I never really listened to that record and I get it now.’ You’re supposed to listen to records and find things, that’s what I like about making records. There’s always layers. I really like that record, it was interesting to make.

You joined the band during their Songs for the Deaf tour, what was the process like?
It was very unforgiving. Josh called me and gave me a week to learn 38 songs, and I had to learn those 38 songs with three instruments. It was a lot of memory space. It’s a challenge, it’s not supposed to be easy, you can’t just join a band and go ‘Wow, this is cool.’ It has to be a challenge otherwise it’s just boring. It was a great opportunity for me to express a bunch of different stuff that I know, I can fake my way on piano, and I can definitely play guitar.

The fact that Nick was fired is still something that’s brought up all the time in the media, and there always seems to be speculation, is that something you can clear up at all?
When it comes to that record and the touring that we did on that record, there were number one hits from it and went Gold in multiple countries, so with that kind of stuff, sometimes it pushes people. Sometimes it changes them, and in the process of us doing 19 months of touring… that’ll destroy any band. It really did separate things between Josh and him, and it’s their business and their friendship and I don’t feel comfortable talking about it, but you can imagine what goes on. When you’re touring, you’re excessively being excessive. Things can go wrong. Sometimes people grow apart, and at the end of the day I think that’s ultimately what happened.

Do you have any standout memories from touring or something really fucked up that’s happened?
Do you wanna hear something fucked up?

Yeah.
Of course you do. There was one time when we performed an appendectomy, backstage in Munich. We forgot the anaesthesia. I do know how to perform these operations, but I’d had too much to drink that day. But she’s okay.

Who was it on?
It’s actually a legal matter… It’s a medical slash legal matter and I can’t say much more than that.