On many of the Melvins’ greatest songs, drummer Dale Crover is really the soloist. Listen to the opening drum clatter on “Hooch” that kicks off their landmark 1993 album Houdini, ham-fisted but hyper-precise, a weird architectural construction that takes mere seconds for Crover to build and then topple spectacularly before our eyes. Listen to those woodblock thunks on “Lizzy,” which glint like distant lights in a dark, dismal swamp. The Melvins’ lyrics are famously inscrutable, and there’s the sense in their best music that the drum part is as likely to carry the song’s “meaning” as the words. Crover is such a marvelously expressive drummer that his decision to go kit-to-kit with Big Business’s Coady Willis during the band’s acclaimed late-2000s run scanned as an enormous risk — but taking enormous risks is something the Melvins have been great at for their entire career, from their origins as the slowest band in Montesano, WA to their current status as a beloved cult band whose entire career feels like a wilderness period.

Crover, alongside shock-haired singer-guitarist Buzz Osbourne, is the only member of the band who has stayed consistent across all incarnations; even when they reconnected with original drummer Mike Dillard as Melvins 1983 for their excellent 2013 sludge-punk romp Tres Cabrones, Crover stayed on to play bass. Yet he’s stayed busy with countless side projects and solo projects, on many of which he plays the role of singer-songwriter — including Glossolalia, his third album under his own name, which releases Friday. As a solo artist, Crover’s tastes lean towards ’60s pop and ’70s hard rock, bubblegum kitsch and proto-metal riffage, with KISS as a guiding light ever since the Melvins’ KISS-inspired move to release separate solo EPs by each member in 1992. And though it’s technically “solo,” it features an enviable cast of collaborators, from garage-rock firebrand Ty Segall to Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil to Tom Waits, who came out of Northern California seclusion to record a few seconds of actual glossolalia to open the album.

We talked to Crover over the phone about Glossolalia and the various oddball side projects, solo projects and one-offs he’s been involved in over his impressive four-decade career.

Allegedly Playing In An Iron Maiden Cover Band (pre-1983)

DALE CROVER: It’s not true. I don’t know why that one sticks so much. Maybe because we said it so many times — actually I’m not even the one that said that. I think Buzz probably made that one up. I wish it was that cool, you know?

But I did start playing in cover bands when I was 14. I probably wanted it to be an Iron Maiden cover band, because back then I really did like that band. And I would say that their first drummer [Clive Burr] was definitely a big influence on me. I’m the right age to totally be into KISS, but after KISS started going in a different direction than I was interested in, I discovered the Iron Maiden record Unleashed In The East. If you look at the cover of that, it seems like an easy transition from KISS to them because they kinda look like a tougher version of KISS.

Is this when they were doing Music From The Elder?

CROVER: Yeah, and even, like, Dynasty. I went from Judas Priest to Iron Maiden pretty quickly. Anyway, I was not in an Iron Maiden cover band, but I was in a cover band. The guys that I played with in the band were a few years older than me, and so their thing was playing at high school dances where you would actually get paid money. We had to play covers that other kids wanted to hear, which wasn’t necessarily stuff I was into — you know, stuff like Loverboy.

What were you doing musically when you joined the Melvins? Were you in any bands at that time?

CROVER: There was really nothing going on. That cover band had kind of fizzled out because our singer joined the Navy, and we tried to continue, but it didn’t really work out. And I used to play with this other guy, his brother was my age. This was in junior high school, the beginning of high school. He was somebody that I was more aligned with musically. We were super into like Black Sabbath, that was his favorite band. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, that kind of stuff. We also wrote our own songs, and we wrote stuff that was tuned down to D, which was what Black Sabbath did. And that guy actually showed Buzz that tuning not long after I joined the Melvins.

But that guy had a little bit of a history with the cops and had been in trouble as a teen a bunch, and he was actually doing time, so I had nothing going on. I remember the day that I joined the Melvins, my mom said, “You need to get into a band that’s gonna do something.” And later that day, both Buzz and [original bassist] Matt [Lukin] came over to my house with Krist Novoselic, looking for a drummer, and later my mom said, “I didn’t mean you had to do it today [laughs].”

Playing With Kurt Cobain In Fecal Matter And, Briefly, Nirvana (1985-1994)

CROVER: Kurt, it’s funny, I remember meeting him not long after I joined the Melvins. The other two guys knew him from the neighboring town, Montesano. He was a little bit younger than them, but in Montesano their school was junior high and high school all in one, so they knew him from that. I think that Buzz knew Kurt from little league baseball. And they were on their way to my house on the bus one day to practice, and when they got there, they’re like, “Oh, hey, we just met this guy that we know from Montesano named Kurt who plays guitar.” It was funny because the next day I met him at the smoker shed at my high school, back when high school actually had a place for you to go smoke cigarettes. We hit it off right away.

We probably would’ve had him play with us, and there was talk about it for about a day. He had a guitar, but he had no amp, so that kind of put the kibosh on that right away. He lived a block away from me. I remember one day going over to his house, and he played me this demo tape he’d made at his aunt’s house and he was playing drums on cardboard boxes. His aunt had this four-track tape machine, and he’d recorded all these songs that he wrote. He started hanging out with us and going to shows and starting to write, starting to get into punk rock. Those guys took him to the very first punk rock show he went to, which was Black Flag in 1984.

At the Mountaineers Hall in Seattle, with Green River opening!

CROVER: Probably. I would’ve gone to that show, but I was already missing a bunch of school from playing in the band. That show was on a weekday [Tuesday], and I don’t think my parents wanted me to go, which was too bad because I was just getting into the band.

But anyway, he was starting to write songs that were more in a punk rock vein, and definitely he was influenced by the Melvins. It was like a whole set of songs that nobody’s ever heard before and nobody’s heard since, but I remember liking them a lot and thinking it was really cool. I can’t really remember just kind of offering to like jam or whatever, but Kurt was one of those guys I remember instantly liking. It’s like one of those guys that you meet that you feel really comfortable with, like you’ve known them for your whole life or something.

For about a week the Melvins were contemplating looking for somebody else to play the drums because I was still in high school and they wanted to go on tour, so I was thinking, “Okay, well I’ll just go play with Kurt.” And so he had this whole set of songs that we learned and then went and recorded at his aunt’s house, and we probably would’ve continued playing together, but then Melvins changed their mind and I was back playing with them. But we would still jam. I remember for a while he was playing with Buzz playing bass and the old Melvins drummer [Mike Dillard] playing drums. I think they played for a while and then somehow that fell apart. Then I was playing bass, and the kid that lived across the alley from me was playing drums. So that lasted for a little while.

Is it true that Buzz joined that band but then Kurt kicked him out because he didn’t have a bass amp?

CROVER: I don’t know. I mean, don’t believe everything you read, you know? Like I said, Kurt didn’t have a guitar amp.

One super specific question, I don’t know if you remember this, but was when the two of you made that demo, was that in December 1985 or March 1986? There’s debate among music historians over which one—it would’ve been winter or Easter break.

CROVER: It was probably summertime, but I can’t really remember. It wasn’t winter, I know that. Probably 1986 would’ve been right.

Then you joined Nirvana a while later.

CROVER: Sorta. Those guys formed a band and they had a couple different drummers, and they really wanted somebody that liked the same kind of music that they did. They were playing with this guy Aaron Burckhard in Aberdeen, and he probably wasn’t quite into the same kind of music. Those guys liked punk rock, and Aaron liked more classic rock-type stuff, so they wanted somebody that was more versed in that kind of thing, so they had me play with them for a while. And there was a little period where the Melvins were kind of on hiatus and they asked me to join, but we were already gonna move to San Francisco. I said I would play with them until I moved. So I learned all their songs, and they were already playing outside of town. Like they were playing in Tacoma and Olympia. They might have played Seattle, but maybe not yet.

There was a place in Tacoma called Community World Theater, and they were already playing shows there. I learned a set and probably learned about 10 songs. I remember it was right around the time the first Soundgarden EP had come out, and those guys had recorded it at a studio called Reciprocal in Seattle. Kurt was there, and he called up the studio and booked time to go and record and told the guy, who was Jack Endino who had played in Skin Yard, that I was playing drums with him. Went up there and did like about 10 songs in one day and then went that night and played a show at the Community World Theater in Tacoma. Jack really liked it right away. He really liked Kurt’s voice. He pretty much the next day played it for those guys from Sub Pop. They got a call literally the next day saying like, “Oh, these guys really like this stuff.” So pretty funny that all the stuff happened in such a short period of time.

Did you expect them to become as big as they became?

CROVER: Not at all. They were pretty heavily influenced by the Melvins. It was our little brother band, sort of. It was before they kind of found their own voice. I remember them coming to San Francisco, and we kept in touch a lot. Kurt and I would write to each other back and forth and talk all the time. Before I left and moved to San Francisco, he was the last person I saw. We were pretty close. I remember them coming down to San Francisco one time and playing me some of their new songs and I was like, “Wow, this is cool. It sounds like you guys have been listening to the Smithereens.” And their eyes got really big and they’re like, “What? How did you know?” But it was a good formula. It’s almost like taking what Melvins did with the heaviness and then adding more of a Beatles influence to it.

Then they blew up and were shouting you out a bunch — did you feel any pressure?

CROVER: Pressure? No, not at all. We thought it was great. That’s only helped our band. Even now there’s kids that discover Nirvana and want to know their roots, and we still exist. I never would’ve expected that they would get as big as they did.

So they kicked out Chad [Channing, their original drummer] and then immediately got offered a tour opening for Sonic Youth. This was after Bleach had been out, and they were already having some interest in other labels. They were gonna do a record with Butch Vig. They’d already done some demos with Chad, and it was gonna be on Sub Pop, and I was gonna record the next record with them, which would’ve been Nevermind.

They came down and started rehearsing and we did this tour opening for Sonic Youth. And even by the time they got to my house, things had changed. Mudhoney had kind of broken up and they decided they could get Danny [Peters] to play with them because he was a good drummer, and I think they’d actually already recorded with him, but they had already asked me to do the tour, so they still wanted me to play with them. I think that that kind of ruined things for them because they realized my style more fit what they wanted than Danny’s. Danny was kind of more of a ’60s kind of Mitch Mitchell-style drummer.

You might know this already, but when they were down rehearsing with me, we took them to see Scream, which was Dave Grohl’s old band, and then they saw Dave, and they were like, oh, wow. And everything kind of worked out weirdly enough. Right after that show Scream were in Los Angeles and their bass player split in the middle of the night with all their money and the band was stranded there and broke up. And Dave called us up and told us what had happened, and that’s when Buzz told him, well, these guys in this band called Nirvana saw you play, and they’re looking for a drummer. So the rest is kind of history.

But I remember on that tour, there was definitely some interest in them. They were already talking to major labels and managers and things like that. And I just remember thinking Sonic Youth were on a major label, and they were kind of a weird arty band. They had sold like 100,000 records, and I’m like that’s pretty great. I think you guys are maybe even more accessible than Sonic Youth. I bet you could sell 200,000 records. Then they go on to sell millions of records. I underestimated the whole thing. I guess I should’ve just said I’ll just play with you guys, but it’s fine the way that everything worked out. I don’t have any regrets and I was happy to be involved with those guys.

Playing Neil Young In A Neil Young Video (1992)

Did people always tell you looked like Neil Young?

CROVER: A few people had mentioned that before. I remember seeing my picture, I think it was like a paper in the Pacific Northwest, where it said something about me looking like Neil Young. It said something about Neil Young being in Melvins. That was pretty funny.

I was in San Francisco in the early ’90s. The Oliver Stone Doors movie, some of it was shot in San Francisco, and they had a call for extras for that movie. I went down with my girlfriend at the time and we were extras in the Doors movie for this concert scene. I remember she had called this hotline for people looking for extras, and on this message it said that they’re looking for people for a Neil Young video. I remember almost not going, because we had moved that day and I was too tired. The Doors movie was kind of grueling, it was like this overnight shoot.

I almost didn’t go, but we ended up going to this casting call, and when I walked in, they were like, “Did you know that we’re looking for somebody that looks like Neil Young to play the young Neil Young?” So they did a screen test, and I got the part. When I met Neil Young, I was dressed just like him. That was very odd.

Did you ever reconvene with Neil Young later?

CROVER: I’ve seen him a couple times since then, but it’s been a long time. Last time I saw him, I went with the guys from Pearl Jam when they were playing one of his Bridge School Benefit concerts. I remember seeing him there and talking to him there for a little bit, but I haven’t kept in contact or anything like that.

Altamont (1994-2005)

CROVER: Back in the early ’90s in San Francisco, I had a band called Altamont, and that’s where I played guitar and sang. We did a bunch of records and played a bunch of shows around there for a while. In the ’90s, everyone in the Melvins lived in different cities, so that’s one reason I wanted to start another band locally. Also because I wanted to do something where I played guitar and sang. I had bought my first electric guitar after the Melvins did their first kind of successful US tour in 1989 or ’90, and then I bought an amp, and I’m like, “Oh, I wanna do something with this.” Then also Melvins did these solo records inspired by KISS where we all wrote our own songs, and I played guitar and drums and sang. So that was something that kind of got me interested in wanting to do more solo stuff. I mean, Altamont was a band, but I pretty much wrote all the songs.

Where were the other members of the Melvins living while you were in San Francisco?

CROVER: Buzz lived in LA. He moved there in about ’93. Then we had various bass players, but our bass player at that time, Mark [Deutrom], lived in London. We didn’t do a lot of practicing at that point, so I had a lot of spare time to do other stuff.

The last Altamont album was 2005. Have you done anything with the band since then?

CROVER: I ended up moving to LA in ’99, at the end of ’99, and so that made it a lot harder to work with those guys, and the Melvins started getting really busy around that time. Things were fewer and farther between, but I’m still good friends with all those guys. Dan [Southwick], the bass player, is going to be playing with me on this run of shows coming up that I’m doing. I’m doing a little solo tour after this Redd Kross tour. Also he’s somebody that I’ve written songs with for a long time, a little bit in Altamont. We used to be roommates together. We used to jam and write songs pretty early on.

He and I co-wrote the song “Doug Yuletide,” that’s on my new record. That one came out good. That’s one of my favorite ones. He had this guitar riff that I thought sounded like the Velvet Underground, which is why it’s called “Doug Yuletide.” It was a working title to begin with, and we were recording at Christmastime, but it stuck, so I just kept it.

Going Kit To Kit With Slayer’s Dave Lombardo In The Fantômas-Melvins Big Band (1999-2000)

CROVER: Well, funny — he learned how to play drums from KISS Alive!, almost the same progression as far as our drumming goes. He got really into KISS and then got really into heavy metal stuff. He really liked that first Iron Maiden drummer like I did, and then he went in a more heavy metal direction and joined Slayer, and I joined the Melvins. It was really fun playing with Dave too. I always really liked his drumming. I remember starting out playing with him, and I’m watching him play and I’m like, “There’s something really weird that he’s doing.” And I figured out, I’m like, “You are left-handed, aren’t you?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” When he starts his fills, he starts with his left hand.

There’s a Melvins song, well, maybe you’ve heard of this one called “Honey Bucket.” Our most famous song. I’m trying to imitate the way Dave plays drum fills, and then I come to find out it’s because he plays left-handed. That’s why they sound so weird. There’s another drummer that I really like, Clem Burke, who plays drums in Blondie. I always liked the way that Clem would play drum fills and end with his left hand crashing the cymbal. I thought that that made a lot of sense as a drummer. Usually when you’re playing a drum fill, you’re going around the kit with your right hand, and then if you want to hit a cymbal usually my crash cymbal is on my left, so I would always end with a paradiddle and crash on my left hand. But it turns out that the reason that he did that is because he is left-handed.

When I asked [Dave] about that, he was like, “You know who else is left-handed? Ringo Starr.” I never realized that. Ringo has these really cool drum fills, and there’s always this little pause in between his drum fills because he would have to start with his left hand.

Playing In Redd Kross (2017-present)

CROVER: Redd Kross is a band that I’ve liked for a long time. I first heard them not long after I joined the Melvins, and knew that we were kindred spirits because they were covering KISS songs when KISS was very uncool. They were punk rockers who were growing their hair out and listening to KISS and stuff like that.

I started playing with Steven McDonald in about 2016, but we’ve known those guys for a long time. And that kind of all happened because I played with OFF!, his band with Keith Morris. I filled in for their drummer for a tour, and Steve and I really hit it off — no pun intended. [The Melvins] have gone through a number of bass players, and I thought he’d be a really fun person to play with, and there came a day when Buzz and I were jamming and I was hanging out with Steve McDonald, and I’m like, “Hey, you wanna come over and jam with us?” And it just kind of went from there.

After we were playing together for a few years, and we were putting the Melvins on hold for a little bit, and we were gonna do this tour with Crystal Fairy, this band that Buzz and I started with Teri Gender Bender from Le Butcherettes and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez from the Mars Volta. And unfortunately that all fell apart, but Redd Kross was going to do a tour while Buzz and I were touring, and their drummer was worried about the tour and about leaving. Basically he wasn’t so into doing a big massive tour. So since the Crystal Fairy thing fell apart, Buzz suggested that I play drums for him. So that’s kind of how that all started. We did a bunch of touring, made a record, then had like a five-year hiatus because of COVID.

Those guys made a record last year. I was sidelined for about six months because I ended up having spinal stenosis and I had to have spine surgery. So I didn’t play on the new record, but I sat around and wrote a bunch of songs and made my own record.

You also opened for them DJing, right?

CROVER: I’ve been DJing and also playing acoustic.

What material have you been playing?

CROVER: Well, originally what I wanted to do is have my solo band open, because normally Steven plays bass in it. We had done a tour in 2018 opening for Redd Kross. I wanted to do another solo record, and I thought that might be a good opportunity to do it, but there wasn’t a lot of money to do it, and Steven wanted to concentrate more on Redd Kross instead of do two things at once and also be able to afford to bring a sound man with us and stuff like that. So when he booked the tour, he’s like, “Hey, you’re gonna DJ.”

I open the show and I’ll DJ for about 25 minutes and just kind of play whatever I feel like. It’s more of me just playing whatever music I want rather than scratching and making it some disco nightmare, like most DJs do. Then I’ll play an acoustic set for about 20 minutes. I’m playing new stuff. I’m playing a couple songs from the previous solo records that I did. I also do the Melvins song “The Bit,” because I wrote the guitar part for that song. Playing by yourself solo is easy because you can kind of just go with it. You don’t throw anybody else off, and you can change words or change parts and not worry about somebody following along with you.

One thing that you’ve mentioned a few times about Redd Kross is how they appealed to you because they were growing their hair out and playing KISS songs. I wanted to ask you about KISS’ standing in the rock world that you were in at that time. It seems like a lot of the bands in the Northwest that came along later were exalting KISS and taking a lot of influence from them, but you say that they were kind of uncool at the time. Can you kind of talk a little bit about how KISS and those classic ’70s hard rock bands were perceived at the time and how that changed?

CROVER: Well, I mean, like I said, I was the right age for KISS. I remember the first time seeing them on TV was The Paul Lynde Halloween Special [in 1976]. For a lot of people my age, that was kind of like our Ed Sullivan Beatles moment. I remember just watching them, just going like, “What the fuck is this?” This is weird. These guys are weird-looking, you know? And then right away kids at my school were bringing in KISS records and playing them at lunchtime. That’s where I probably heard the first two KISS Alive! records and became into it immediately. That definitely was the band that inspired me to want to be in a band. That made me wanna play music. That’s how I learned to play drums, from KISS Alive!, just listening to that record and imitating.

By the time I joined the Melvins, KISS had gone in this direction that like I said I wasn’t too excited about, you know, they had gone disco more or less, they were definitely less rock and roll. That’s kinda when I moved on to the stuff that was heavier and harder. I mentioned I’d been in cover bands, but I was into more New Wave of British Heavy Metal stuff than the stuff those guys were playing. And that band played this radio show, this talent show where you’d come down to the local Elk Lodge and be on the radio and do whatever. So our band went down there to play, and then when we got there, there was this other band already playing, and it was the Melvins.

Where we grew up was a pretty small area, and we thought we knew pretty much every band that existed around that area. And here was this band that was a punk rock band. We’d never really seen anything like it, and we had no idea where these guys came from. And the only thing I could really relate to what they sounded like was the Ramones and Motörhead, which, you know, I knew the Ramones from that movie Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. And well, I knew Motörhead. But they had these really short, fast songs, and they’re really intense and I remember liking it and thinking like, wow.

I saw them again about four or five months later and it wasn’t too long after that that those guys came over and said that they were looking for a drummer. They were super into bands like Black Flag and all the stuff that was happening on SST. Husker Dü, The Minutemen. Plus they liked Bowie and the Sex Pistols and the Damned and English punk rock, a lot of current underground punk rock that was happening, Butthole Surfers, all the stuff on Touch and Go.

They were well-versed in music, but they also still listened to the stuff that they grew up with, which was like Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin. They never shunned that stuff or stopped listening to that stuff. What I remembered after joining the band and those guys playing those records was like, “Oh, yeah, those early KISS records are really good.” And they’re still really good. Even on this tour we had a sound man who didn’t really know KISS, and I was like, “You should listen to KISS Alive!” And so the other day we listened to that record.

Even with Jeff and Steve McDonald, that’s the stuff that they grew up with too. Those guys never forgot. Steven announces every night that when he was eight years old his older brother who was 11 took him to this concert and it changed his life and that KISS are the ones pretty much responsible for this whole mess. I’d have to concur. If it wasn’t for those guys, things would be different. The first concert I ever went to was KISS and it just went from there, and I’m happy to say that I still like those guys.

Do you remember where KISS played when you saw him for the first time?

CROVER: It was in 1979, in November of 1979 at the Seattle Center Coliseum. It was on the Dynasty tour.

Glossolalia (2024)

CROVER: I’ve done two [solo albums] before. I just kind of went on a songwriting spree. Even before I had to have surgery, I was already starting to write a bunch of songs and working towards a record. It was just something that I wanted to continue. It was time. My last one came out in 2020 at some point, so it was time for a new one, and I just got really inspired to write songs, and I probably had about half of them before I had to have back surgery, and after I got out of the surgery I went on another writing spree and wrote a bunch more songs.

Did you find that there was anything different about the songs that you wrote before the surgery versus the ones after?

CROVER: I couldn’t sing the way that I normally do. With my surgery, they went through my neck and they had to move all my vocal cords aside to get to the discs in my neck. That’s what my problem was, those discs were compressing my spine, it was kind of an odd surgery. But yeah, it totally fucked up my vocal chords, so my range was somewhat limited and I ended up writing songs in a more baritone voice, at least for some of the songs. I mean, it worked out fine, just because the songs just sounded better that way anyway. It was sort of intentional, but not.

Is your voice still affected?

CROVER: No, I’d say everything’s back pretty much a hundred percent.

How long did it take, and was there anything you did to help the recovery process?

CROVER: I did vocal exercises, just with stuff I found off the internet and some stuff that some friends told me to do. I did a lot of that stuff and just a lot of physical therapy. It wasn’t long after I had the surgery where I just started playing again. I started playing guitar right away, just working on stuff.

How did you get Tom Waits on this album? Doesn’t he hang out on his ranch and not talk to anyone?

CROVER: Probably. That was the weirdest one. Getting Kim Thayil was not a big deal. I just texted him, and Joyful Noise was like “Hey, what do you think about maybe having some guest stars in this record?” And we just made a big list of guest stars, some of them were kind of ridiculous. With Kim, I had that song that he played on called “I Quit,” and I thought it’d be cool to have him play lead guitar, so he said yes right away.

Then I was working with Toshi Kasai, who’s engineered the Melvins records for the last 20-odd years or whatever, and he’s like, “Hey, I have a connection to Tom Waits.” I’m thinking he’s not gonna do it, but you don’t know until you ask. It’s like a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon connection he has with him, his stepmom’s friend’s mom’s sister manages him or something. And I had this song that was about speaking in tongues, and we’re thinking someone should actually speak in tongues on this. Maybe he would actually do it if it’s something as weird as that. He probably gets asked to do stuff like that all the time.

So Toshi texted the sister and she got back to us right away. I guess she used to manage White Zombie, and so she kind of knew who the Melvins were. So we sent the song over and I guess she saw [Waits] the next day and played it for him. And he liked it and liked the idea, but she’s like, “He’s pretty busy right now and we move like snails around here, so it could take a little bit of time.” That’s fine. We’ve got some time until we have to be finished with this thing. So we waited and waited, then he finally did it. He just talks in tongues for about 10 seconds at the beginning of the record, but it was pretty awesome. I can’t believe I got him to do it.

Who else was on the list of guest stars for consideration?

CROVER: There were a few people that we asked that said no. The only person I want to mention is we wanted to get Adrian Belew to play a guitar solo. He was like, “I really like the Melvins a lot, but I’m super busy and I just don’t have time.” So it wasn’t like “no, who are you” or anything like that. I wanted him to play a solo on that song “Doug Yuletide” because it sounds a bit like the Talking Heads. The guy that runs Joyful Noise, he’s like, “What about André 3000, what if you got him to play flute?” But he’d changed his number, he couldn’t get in touch with him, and by that point we had enough people anyway.

Glossolalia is out 9/13 via Joyful Noise.