How long does heartbreak last? A month? A year? Forever?
The same question could be posed regarding the legacy of an album.
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When Queens of the Stone Age’s Lullabies to Paralyze was being recorded, I was in the middle of a tour with my band. When the first single “Little Sister” came out in 2005, I was on a belated honeymoon with my drummer, but by the time “In My Head” was released as a single, we had gone our separate ways. Oscar Wilde boldly stated that life imitates art, so you really can’t expect a breakup album to soundtrack anything but.
A band is like family. On the road, you sleep together, eat together, bring out the best and worst in one another, drive yourself (and everyone else) mad at times, cry and laugh and get drunk and high together like a lovingly dysfunctional superorganism made of several arms, legs, and heads. And if any of these arms, legs, or heads get cut off (voluntarily or not), metamorphosis occurs.
This is what happened with Lullabies to Paralyze, which despite being the band’s fourth album proper, carried a distinctive sophomore syndrome scent that could be felt for miles. Recorded in the aftermath of bassist Nick Oliveri’s exit-cum-firing and with Mark Lanegan on tour with his own band, Lullabies seemed cursed from the get-go—if only due to the many setbacks and delays plaguing a release process that even included a frustrating premature leak. Now a largely Homme-led operation (who apparently had even considered ending the band altogether), the new QOTSA incarnation included Songs for the Deaf contributor Alain Johannes as well as touring members Troy Van Leeuwen and Joey Castillo, recruited to serve as co-writers and official personnel. However, all eyes and ears naturally were on the band’s founder and frontman, who vowed to resist making Songs for the Deaf 2. A certain evolutionary allure was otherwise noticeable to anyone paying enough attention: Reviewing it for SPIN at the time, Will Hermes declared Lullabies to Paralyze to be “the Queens’ ‘mature’ album” (quote marks and all), only to also wonder “Should hard rock be mature? I dunno.” Yet the harsh truth about every rock band is that you eventually grow up, both together and individually, and accepting this can prove the toughest challenge you’ll ever go through.
Lullabies to Paralyze felt like waking up to everything beautiful and everything damned, like recklessly embarking on something you know is doomed from the very start. Though its troubled background and context definitely contributed to this perception, the album does possess a somewhat tragic undertone that ended up working like an omen as my drummer and I listened to it on repeat during that spring. In the forefront were “Little Sister” and “In My Head,” which would become a symbolic alpha and omega for the arc that was our romance, a sort of sonic bookends for relationships in the Web 2.0 age. At the time, of course, we were still oblivious to this fact.
The insistent cowbell sound of “Little Sister” (which is actually a jam block) and overall disquietude mimics the intensity of beginnings, of pleas, of letting your guard down once and for all, while “In My Head” lingers longer through a revolving structure reminiscent of that going-nowhere spiraling you find yourself in when something you had put your faith into fails to concretize (Sacha Jenkins called it “an infectious, if desperate, pop tart”). But both songs are about obsessive promises that turn out to be more ephemeral than you care to admit, because deep down you know your infatuation is mostly with the obsession itself. Besides, Jacqueline Susann once wrote that pledging eternal love is only valid for that one moment in time—no one can truly hold on to that as a lifetime guarantee. And boy, did we make loads of plans for the sole purpose of breaking them.
But doesn’t everyone?
Though we finally called it quits by mutual accord, that doesn’t mean it was any easier. With the band on a temporary break from concerts and rehearsals, I got to roll around in my own misery for a couple of weeks, playing Lullabies in a loop and basking in self-pity until I decided it was time to snap out of it. I deleted the songs from my Winamp queue, raised my head, and returned to social life in the land of the living instead of permanently replaying what ifs that had no practical use in the real world. Sometimes you’re just in different places in life; sometimes that’s exactly why it hits you the hardest.
Later that summer I was playing some records at a college party, and as I finished my set and headed off to the bar, the DJ that came immediately after unleashed “In My Head” without mercy. I froze for a couple of minutes and almost broke down—it was all so recent still. Reaching inside my bag for a cigarette, I absentmindedly looked at my phone only to realize that my ex had just texted me. My heart jumped into my throat; in the background, Josh Homme moaned “hurry up and wait forever.” Roll credits, I guess.
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