![]() ![]() ![]() "When I didn't know what to do with my anger sometimes as a younger man, I would watch Bob Ross," Homme says. Homme remembers Ross as a calming presence and tuned in regularly throughout his teens and twenties. On the counter is a Bob Ross coloring book, a tribute to the late TV art instructor and host of The Joy of Painting - a man famous for his fluffy perm and soothing demeanor, who for years taught viewers how to paint landscapes with happy clouds and snow-capped mountains. He's now got a dapper ginger-and-white Van Dyke beard fit for Robin Hood or one of the Three Musketeers, and he's clad in a gray hoodie, skull and lightning bolts across his chest, leopard-print loafers on his feet. In a month he'll be turning 50, and he's still a wisecracking, sturdy redhead who stands tall and fills whatever room he's in. In most ways, Homme is as he's always been since I first met him in 2002. Video of Queens of the Stone Age - " Emotion Sickness" And there's a lot of people I want to do that with." "Cancer is just the cherry on top of an interesting time period, you know? I'm extremely thankful that I'll get through this, and I'll look back at this as something that's fucked up - but will have made me better. But I do say it can get better," he offers. I never say that, and I wouldn't advise it. As he sits in a cushioned chair, in an enclosed patio overlooking the backyard, he gets the occasional twinge of pain. He won't get into details other than to say that surgery to remove it was successful, though he's still healing. It's his first since COVID-19, since the death of many close friends and colleagues, since the end of his marriage and the public nightmare of a custody battle over his three kids - and the first since so much else went off the rails. ![]() Today's mid-April conversation with Revolver is his first extensive personal interview in years. I think I was doing it because when I'm in trouble, this is what I do. "I think this is the first time I didn't want to make a record, but I was dealing with a lot of stuff in my personal life," Homme adds. "When someone says it's not personal, I'm like, 'That's just the lie you tell yourself, motherfucker.' If it's not personal, don't do it." "For me, it's all personal," the singer-guitarist says with a laugh. If some of the band's earliest lyrics were notable for bizarre, surreal imagery, Homme's songwriting has grown increasingly personal and vulnerable. Song titles are often made-up words and phrases that are self-explanatory and revealing of his state of mind: "Obscenery," "Carnavoyeur," "Paper Machete," or the first single, "Emotion Sickness." The album that came out of those sessions, In Times New Roman…, is their most direct and hard-rocking in years - with a sound and feeling that Homme describes as "sonic brutality," as songs aim to make sense of this period of his life. "I felt chained to the floor for the last three years," he says, but he did ultimately begin work on new music with his band of brothers in Queens of the Stone Age. His work as a creative artist slowed to a crawl during that time, he says now. ![]()
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