(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Sun 9 November 2025 21:45, UK
It’s fairly often that artists find themselves in creative slumps, twiddling their thumbs, wondering if they’ll ever make something again. It’s not quite as often that those artists are in a slump because they died momentarily, but Josh Homme has never been conventional.
In 2010, the Queens of the Stone Age frontman went into the hospital for knee surgery, and his heart momentarily stopped when he was on the table. Homme was fine after the operation, but understandably, he was somewhat shaken up, and as if the trauma of your heart stopping wasn’t bad enough, the desert dweller now found himself bed-bound for months. As a rock star who had spent the majority of his life up to that point on the road, you can understand why Homme felt somewhat restless.
“You go through things, you feel sorry for yourself,” said Homme, talking about his depressing time confined to recover, “[When you’re bedridden] you read every book, watch every show, and you have two months left to ride out, so what do you do? Your mind goes sideway, I disappear when it gets like that, because I’m not the sort of guy who can [talk to people I know and] go, ‘This tastes like shit, taste it’. It’s hard to want to include someone you care about when it’s awful.”
At this time, Homme was in a period that he referred to as “the fog”. Not quite dead, but also not really existing, just lost in a haze as he recovered from surgery, binging TV programs and trying to look forward to life resembling some form of normality. We’ve all been in similar positions before, when you can’t go out or do the things you like to do because of illness or because you’re recovering. During these periods, we all know that it’s merely a moment in time, but that knowledge doesn’t help that period pass any easier. Homme was in the trenches, and that fog was getting pretty hard to see through.
A side effect of that lulling period was that Homme wasn’t sure whether he wanted to make another album. Despite Queens of the Stone Age’s success, he had had that creative spark snuffed out by recovery, and now, wandering around his studios, he pondered whether or not he would use them again. In this creative rut, he reached out to someone he knew he could talk to about anything: Trent Reznor.
“I didn’t know if I could make a record again,” said Homme, with a handful of song ideas and inkling, “And I don’t know why, but I called Trent. I wanted him to produce the record and I didn’t have many songs or know what I was doing and was completely lost. I just said, ‘Man, you wanna have some coffee?’”
Reznor popped down to Pink Duck Studios, and he and Homme set the world to rights. They spoke about music, sure, but it was less so a chat about creativity and more about the world in general, the creative industry, and Homme’s recovery.
“I talked to him about producing the record. And then I went back into a like (acts decrepit) for a while, buzzing like a fridge I guess,” he said, “Then when I came back he was starting the Nine Inch Nails record so he didn’t produce my record, but he helped me a lot.”
It was following his conversations with Reznor that Homme knew he wasn’t out for the count just yet. He still had something to offer, both the world and himself, and he still wanted to make and perform music. He got to work and eventually wound up producing Like Clockwork, which is one of the band’s most well-regarded albums. Had it not been for coffee and conversation with Reznor, who knows where Homme might have ended up?
Related Topics