You probably know Josh Homme as the six-foot-five-inch singer and guitarist for Queens of the Stone Age. However, Homme is also the six-foot-five-inch drummer for Eagles of Death Metal, a side project with childhood friend Jesse "the Devil" Hughes and Belgian guitarist Tim Vanhamel. We swooped in for a lively debate with the Don Henley of desert rock.

Is it true you guys named this band Eagles of Death Metal because you met some dude who thought Poison was a death metal band?
No, not really. We met this guy in a local bar who was missing teeth and had been drinking endlessly for years, and that was his belief. But the larger truth is that we're the Eagles of Death Metal, so we're neither death metal nor the Eagles. We're that missing link between them. We were listening to this band, Vader, late at night, and someone said: "We should play death metal, but like the Eagles." And we started to conceive of what that music would sound like. We knew one thing would happen for sure: When you heard that music, your ass would jiggle.

That's interesting, because neither death metal nor the Eagles tend to generate a lot of ass-jiggling music. Why would the union of those aesthetics prompt ass-jiggling?
Because it's not a union. It's what's between them. We're sort of the gatekeeper. We keep the Eagles and death metal from waging an all-out rock war.

But wouldn't the musical space between the Eagles and death metal be pretty much everything? I mean, wouldn't a band like Yes fit into that category?
Sure, absolutely. Yes and no. Why hasn't there been a band called No?

There may have been, actually.
There probably has. It's too easy.

You guys cover "Stuck in the Middle With You." Is that because you like Stealers Wheel, or because you like to chop the ears off of cops?
It's because we want to put a new face on such a lovely song. That song has a sexy vibe to it, and I don't know if you know the Eagles of Death Metal's motto, but we're trying to commit everyone to "death by sexy." That's what we say before every show: "All right, people, death by sexy."

Your other band, Queens of the Stone Age, was essentially a group with two permanent members. Bassist Nick Oliveri has now departed. How can a two-member band still exist after one guy leaves?
That's a good question. Let me try to answer this carefully, so that I don't get fucked: I don't feel like the issue here is anything musical. The issue is more personal. It is about my relationship with my friend Nick. The band started with me having this idea of working with people and trying to take their best songs. I've done it by myself, and I've done it with other people, and I've done it a lot with Nick.

So Queens of the Stone Age is an idea.
That's it. I already miss Nick, but I can't be someone's babysitter for their life. There've just been too many incidents where Nick is the tornado who goes on to the next city and expects everyone to clean up his mess. Keeping him out of trouble is a full-time job. And then I got my own trouble, because I like to party and fuck around, too.

So, would it be accurate to say that the issue with Nick was wholly behavioral?
Fuckin' A.

If there was literally an eagle of death metal--and I mean an actual warm-blooded bird representing that genre of music--would it be able to defeat a Probot, if a Probot existed?
Yes. I think we'd be able to soar high above and shit on the Probot until all its gears were jammed up with crap.

Good strategy. We're all about getting high and then coming down low. But we would never want to attack a Probot. We would use mind control to have Probots do all of our work for us because, quite honestly, that's a sexier way to go to war.