John Paul Jones on Them Crooked Vultures

John Paul Jones was an original member of seminal band Led Zeppelin. He’s recently teamed up with Dave Grohl and Josh Homme to create Them Crooked Vultures, and he revealed that this project developed differently to anything else he’s done in his more than forty year career.

“We just plugged in and started playing the first day. Then the second day it was like, oh, does anybody have any chords we want to work on? I think Josh came up with a few and we were like oh, let’s work on those. So by the time I went home and the end of that week we’d actually worked on a tune and a half. Then basically I just went back a few weeks later and we just switched the machines on and just started writing and recording at the same time, which was kind of unusual for me. Normally we figure out all the songs first and then go in to the studio.”

Those sessions resulted in the self-titled debut album that was released in Australia last Friday.

Jones is a multi-instrumentalist and reported that his skills were put to good use in the studio.

“There is a mandolin on one track. Bass mandolin is on Elephants and then the 10-string bass and 12-string bass, 4-string bass are on there as well.”