When we called him on the phone, John Garcia was getting ready to go on a camping trip in the mountains with his family and enjoy a “well-deserved break”, as he put it. Admittedly, the man whose voice has graced the music of several brilliant stoner rock bands (namely Kyuss, Unida, Hermano and Slo Burn) has been rather busy lately. After a hard battle to reform Kyuss – which led to legal action from his former colleagues Josh Homme and Scott Reeder – and an album released under the name Vista Chino, John Garcia is back with that solo album we’d been expecting for so many years. The small tour he did with Unida, and which stopped by Hellfest, was just the icing on the cake. The hectic Kyuss Lives! episode obviously made him want to focus on himself, and on the simple yet important things, like his family or the songs he loved but had put into a box. “I’m on a mission”, he says again and again in the second half of this rich interview. And the goal of this mission is simple: to find happiness.

It’s a truly generous interview this self-described musical explorer gave us. Always honest and passionate, sometimes moving, John Garcia first talks about his newly-released solo album, then gradually lets us into his life and personality. We talked about “his desert”, as he likes to call it, about Josh Homme and Scott Reeder, about his future as a solo artist, and about his various bands. Although the interview is quite long, you should enjoy it from start to finish if you like the man and his music.

Read the interview…