While chatting late one Saturday night with former Kyuss frontman John Garcia from his home in the Southern California desert, it’s immediately apparent that the concept of him committing his favorite thirteen albums to tape is not something he takes at all lightly. "Mark, I thought about this for such a long time. I go through so many different phases for favourite records. Honestly, this list can change from week to week. It’s so hard."
Garcia has a lot on his plate currently too. As a departure from his roles in Kyuss, Unida, Hermano, Slo Burn and Vista Chino, he’s currently rehearsing hard for some upcoming shows to promote his first solo record entitled, simply, John Garcia. "I’m a husband and a father, first and foremost," he explains. "So, I had to find the right moment to sit down and think about all this. I’d never been asked these kinds of questions before and I badly wanted to do it."
Never a guy to be influenced by popular opinion or peer pressure, Garcia prefers to allow himself to be driven by his emotions instead. "I’ve never understood the concept of guilty pleasures. There are no such things as guilty pleasures for me. I couldn’t give a fat fuckin’ rat’s ass what anyone thinks about what I like. If I want to have a seventies disco night where I listen to nothing but the Bee Gees, I’m going to do it. I don’t care if someone else says that’s lame. I’m a fan of music. I’m not always the best communicator though, and sometimes I may not be capable of expressing exactly what it is that I like about a particular record. It’s not that I lack the intelligence to do it; I just know that a piece of music has to make me feel something."
John Garcia is out now on Napalm Records. Garcia is currently on tour in Europe, heading to the UK for four dates starting at Talking Heads in Southampton on December 3; head to his Facebook for full details. Click on his image below to begin scrolling through John’s choices
