On-Air Blog

Queens of the Stone Age digs into dark days on 'In Times New Roman...'

XPN | By Raina Douris,

Kimberly Junod

Published June 16, 2023 at 11:41 AM EDT

The best works of art are the ones that always give you something new. Think of your favorite movie, painting, or even your favorite place to travel. You could experience it a million times and you'd always discover another thing you've never noticed before — another element of it that delights or fascinates you.

That's the kind of art Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme is interested in making, and you could argue that's what's allowed him to keep making wholly unique music for decades. Queens of the Stone Age just released their eighth studio album, In Times New Roman..., and in this session, Homme joins World Cafe to talk about striving for originality, about humor and wordplay in music, and about the unexpected musical influences he encountered in his youth that still resonate with him now.

Editor's note: This interview was recorded before Homme revealed recently that he was diagnosed with cancer and completed treatment last year.

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On-Air Blog NPR Music

Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, is the host and writer of NPR's daily nationally-syndicated music interview and discovery program World Cafe. She has interviewed artists like Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Questlove and Brandi Carlile, and was a 2022 keynote lecturer on the topic of Folk Music and music discovery at the Chautauqua Institution.

Kimberly Junod

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).