Songfacts®:

• Queens Of The Stone Age bass player Nick Oliveri sings lead on "Tension Head," which he wrote with group leader Josh Homme. The song finds him strung out, looking for a fix. "Like, being sick and going downtown to score or whatever – that kind of vibe," he told Songfacts. "Getting a better kind of thing. That's what the song is about."
• An early version of this song is called "13th Floor" and appears on the 1997 album Cocaine Rodeo by Mondo Generator, a band Josh Homme, Nick Oliveri, and Chris Goss were in before Queens Of The Stone Age. Three years later, they reworked it for QOTSA's second album, Rated R, this time with the title "Tension Head" and some different lyrics.
• Oliveri was going for an Iggy Pop sound with this song. He told Songfacts how it came together: "A friend had an Iggy Pop-esque tune with piano – a kind of 'Lust For Life' tune I guess. I was living in San Francisco and I wrote the lyrics. I remember being hungover, 'on the bathroom floor' kind of thing, and I wrote them down.
  
  I didn't think anything of it but put it on this version we have somewhere out there that never came out – it's a piano song. 'The Passenger' is what it sounds like to me.
  
  So those are the lyrics I came up with, what I thought my version of Iggy words would be, but it didn't come out like Iggy Pop at all."