Songs for the Deaf

The record is loosely a concept album: the listener drives from Los Angeles out to Joshua Tree, tuning into stations from the towns along the way. Josh Homme said the invented radio gave the album its fluidity, and Nick Oliveri said the segments were a jab at how many stations play the same thing over and over. Dave Grohl plays drums, his first appearance on a Queens of the Stone Age record; Homme, a friend since 1992, invited him in October 2000. His kit was recorded in a small, dead-sounding isolation booth, and the cymbals were taken separately: Grohl played every song twice, first on electronic pads so the cymbals made no sound, then with real cymbals over a dummy snare and padded toms. The engineer Eric Valentine credited him for the patience that took. It is the last album with Oliveri as a full member and the first with Mark Lanegan as one. Several songs are reworkings of pieces first recorded for Homme's Desert Sessions, and the main riff of "No One Knows" comes from the same place. The album went gold in the United States, sold a million copies in Europe and was certified platinum by the IFPI in 2008. The running order here is the original American release's as printed.