Songfacts®:

• "The Sky Is Fallin'" was written by Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme and bass player Nick Oliveri. Homme sings lead on the track, which seems to deal with the waves of negative thoughts that can make it feel like the world is ending. He didn't agonize over the words.
  
  "We put the music together and Josh did those lyrics on the fly," Oliveri told Songfacts. "Changed them a couple times, but pretty much did that on the fly. 'Close your eyes and see the sky is fallin'."
• This was the last song Queens Of The Stone Age recorded for their third album, Songs For The Deaf. They needed to fill it up with one more song, so Oliveri and Homme each pulled out a song they had been working on and they tried recording them. Homme's song, "The Sky Is Fallin'," was the clear winner. Oliveri's song, "Open Up and Bleed for Me," he ended up recording with his band Mondo Generator, including it on their 2003 album A Drug Problem That Never Existed.
• That's Dave Grohl pounding away on drums, something he loved to do with Nirvana before taking the frontman role in Foo Fighters. Queens Of The Stone Age is very much Josh Homme's band, and he brings musicians in and out. Grohl was going through a bit of creative malaise with Foo Fighters and thought it would be good for him to get behind the kit again with a different band. Grohl, of course, has lots of ideas when it comes to songwriting, so he had a lot more influence on the song structures than a typical drummer. He reworked many of the drum parts when he joined the project, which was fine with the other Queens. The recording went so well, Grohl even played some live shows with the band, touring with them in the summer of 2002. In his 2013 documentary Sound City, about the studio where Nirvana made Nevermind and QOTSA made Rated R, Josh Homme is one of the featured musicians.
• After the song ends, a DJ comes on and starts a mic break, but then the station changes and we hear another DJ before the station changes yet again, finally settling on one with the positioner, "All death metal, all the time."
  
  The DJs were voiced by associates of the band, and the bits of songs that play through the static were outtakes from real songs they didn't use on the album.
  
  It's a concept that flows through the album: a road trip from Los Angeles to the Joshua Tree desert, a drive Josh Homme made often. In the days before satellite radio, stations would come in and out of range, so you'd have to find a new one every so often.