THAT ONE ALBUM: Melissa Auf der Maur

There’s always that one album; the one you stick up for no matter what and would fornicate with if you literally could. Instead of talking about the discs we love, we’ve decided to turn the spotlight on musicians. MELISSA AUF DER MAUR names her favourite record, one featuring a certain Queens Of Stone Age frontman on guitar.

THE FIRST TIME I HEARD IT

When you’re in your teens you find you’re grabbed by sounds that reflect your inner landscapes because you’re on the hunt to figure out who you are. I didn’t find that music until I became a young woman. My mother was a disc-jockey so when I was 17, I became a DJ at a rock bar in Montreal, one similar to Tattoo Rock Parlour. I was going to art school at the time so I was paying my rent and phone bill through this gig. People would always ask for requests but I was a little shy and snobby so I wouldn’t engage with them. There was this one guy who was really persistent and after months of blowing him off, he handed me a cassette one day and said “Tell me what you think of this. I saw this band in New York a couple months ago,”. The album was KYUSS’ Blues For The Red Sun.

WHY IT’S SO SIGNIFICANT

This record was an epic, heavy landscape album that sounded like it came from another planet. It sounded like Vikings, rolling fields and galloping horses but on a very sort of soft, sonic level. Not like Iron Maiden screaming about goblins. During the time when bands like Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins were just getting into music, I had a dream that changed my life. It was about the power of music and aliens or God-like forces offering these little humans this incredible way to feel music in a three-dimensional way. Like how it would go through people’s bodies, into their bloodstream and into their hearts. In that dream, the sounds of Kyuss were illustrating this whole thing.

The next morning, I committed myself to music and started to play the bass and through a recommendation, I eventually joined Hole. The band played a festival one summer in Belgium where we got to share the stage with Kyuss and that’s where I met Josh Homme, who’s now with Queens Of The Stone Age. I told him about the dream and that I’d find him in the future. I did; we wrote the song “I Need I Want I Will” for my first record in 2004 and it describes the dream I had. Its been kind of like a full circle: an album changed my life and it’s sound helped create my debut more than ten years later.
 

[What do you think of the ex-Hole bassist’s choice for her favourite record?]