Six Shooter

Album: Songs For The Deaf (2002)
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Songfacts®:

  • This burst of distorted mayhem comes midway through the Songs For The Deaf album. Running just 1:19, it's sung by bass player Nick Oliveri, who wrote it with Queens Of The Stone Age leader Josh Homme.

    "We needed an 'explosion' on the record," Oliveri told Songfacts. "We tried to fill in the gaps of what the record needed if you're listening to it as a whole instead of just one song. That was just something the record needed: a quick explosion, and then you're on to the next tune. So that was the whole purpose of 'Six Shooter' – to have a needed explosion to get into the next song, to ease the listener's ear with something that is more melodic after that."

    That more melodic next track is "Hanging Tree."
  • The song started off as a jam. "That was a guitar part I had," Nick Oliveri said in his Songfacts interview. "A strumming, weird thing. I do this weird thing with chords, and I move my hands around on the fretboard, my fingers to different spots."
  • Dean Ween played guitar on this track, and Dave Grohl is on drums. Ween just dropped by for three songs (the others are "Mosquito Song" and "Gonna Leave You") but Grohl played on most of the album and is listed as a band member. He was taking a break from Foo Fighters and returning to drums, which he played with Nirvana.

    Some copies of the album credit Alain Johannes for playing theremin on the track, which is likely in the mix somewhere. The most famous use of that otherworldly instrument is in the Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations."
  • Between some songs on the album be hear the sounds of an analog car radio scanning the dial, as if on a road trip looking for a different station. Between the "The Sky Is Fallin'" and "Six Shooter" we hear one such interstitial, which starts on the fictional radio station KRDL (Kurdle 109, we spoil music for everyone) and ends with an unnamed station that plays "All death metal, all the time."

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