Queens Of The Stone Age are not ones for long Facebook status updates. Earlier today, they posted a brief message, "Recording." Which means it's safe to say the band is in the studio working on a follow up to the excellent 2007 release, Era Vulgaris.
While that message didn't provide much info, the sleuths at ThePRP tracked down an interview guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen recently gave to Fender where he revealed this info:
FN: So what is the latest with the Queens of the Stone Age? New album is apparently in the works?
Troy Van Leeuwen: Yes, we went out to the desert to get started on it before the holidays. We have this little place called Rancho de la Luna. We’ve actually turned a few people on to it. It’s basically just a house with some gear in it. It’s got a great vibe to it so we went out there for a few weeks and got things really rolling out there. It’s always a journey doing a Queens record because you never know how it’s going to be done. It’s always different.
FN: How is this one most different to you thus far?
Troy Van Leeuwen: It’s shaping up differently because we have some new band members that are really key. My role in the band in the past has been multi-instrumentalist: guitar, lap steel, keys. But we added a keyboard/guitar player [Dean Fertida] and so now we have three guitar players and can get any kind of keyboard playing. We are just kind of evolving.
Between me and Dean, our side of the stage is going to have a lot of gear. We both play guitar and both play keys. He’s way more of a pianist than I am, so that will be interesting too. We’re thinking somewhere between Lynyrd Skynyrd and James Brown. All the guitar parts on James Brown records are so rhythmically set in stone and juxtapose each other. It’s like taking what one guitar player would do and splitting it up. It’s multi-layered.
And our new bass player [Michael Shuman] is also really gifted and really talented. So just adding those characters to the mix changes things. It’s more fun to track live like that.
FN: After kicking things off out in the desert, you guys took a break from recording for a bit. How has that affected the way this album is being put together?
Troy Van Leeuwen: Well, we wrote a bunch of stuff during the first sessions and then took a break, and now we’re back to the ghetto-blaster demo stage.
The last record we did, it was all from the studio. That worked for that record. This time, we’re all microscopically looking at the parts and the arrangements of the songs so we can go in and perform them while the digital tape is rolling.”
