Queens of the Stone Age - Go with the Flow

I want something good to die for, to make it beautiful to live.

Album: Songs for the Deaf [3rd album]
Recorded: Los Angeles, California
Genre: Rock, Hard Rock, Stoner Rock, Desert Rock
Album Release: August 27th 2002
Single Release: April 7th 2002 [second single]
Length: 3.07
Producer: Josh Homme & Eric Valentine
Vocalist: Josh Homme [age 29]
Label: Interscope

Music Video


Live on Jay Leno in 2003

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 200 million
YouTube Music: Over 100 million

Credits & Gear

Bass, drums, guitar, rhythm guitar, vocals

Details

• Songs for the Deaf was the first QoTSA album to feature Dave Grohl on drums although it's Gene Trautmann playing here.
  
• Singer Josh Homme regularly hosted a series of jams called 'The Desert Sessions' which is where he first came up with a draft of this track. The original didn't have Homme on vocals.
  
  
• Songs for the Deaf is about a long drive around California and was recorded there. It features the moronic ramblings of fake radio DJs. Bassist and songwriter Nick Olivieri described the skits as 'we don't get played on the radio so I figured we should talk shit about them,'
  
  
• While QoTSA were touring Songs for the Deaf in the UK an actual group of deaf people turned up expecting songs made especially for them. They had their money refunded. (Josh Homme recounted the story to Q Magazine)
  
  
• The song is ostensibly about a guy in a relationship with a girl who doesn't love him. He knows she uses men for a thrill and is doing the same to him but he can't bring himself to leave her. On a deeper level, it's about how relationships at the turn of the millennium had become shallow. People line up, 'little soldiers in a row falling in and out of love', for easy romance and easier love only to find that their relationships end just as easily.
  
  The singer wants a deeper connection and wonders if others feel the same way, 'I want something good to die for, to make it beautiful to live.' However, he didn't make the rules he just plays the game, so he'll go with the flow as quick and easy was how it was in 2002.
  
  Soon after releasing the song, Homme met the woman he was looking for when he started a relationship with the singer Brody Dalle in 2003. They would go on to get married and start a family. It's notable that a rock star on a career high is lamenting the lack of love in his life.
  
  He surely had easy access to fast, meaningless women but rock in 2002, at least in the case of QoTSA, had moved on from the 'Girls, Girls, Girls' mentality of the '80s typified by the likes of Mötley Crüe, and into an existential search for meaning amidst the hangovers and discarded g-strings.
  
  
• There is a cover version by Royksopp.
  
  
  
  

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