10 songs Foo Fighters should have never released
After forming out of the ashes of Nirvana, Foo Fighters was never intended to be one of the biggest bands in the world. The whole thing came together as a pet project for Dave Grohl while he figured out what he was going to do, but somewhere along the line, he created one of the biggest stadium rock acts that the world had ever seen. While that’s the kind of comeback story that most people would kill to have during their career, that didn’t mean that a few stumbling blocks didn’t happen along the way.
Whereas most artists have those embarrassing moments they don’t want to discuss, Foo Fighters have at least had a track record of being anywhere between good and great throughout their career. When they do strike out on occasion, it sounds like more of a trainwreck than usual, either having a song that doesn’t cut it or working with a sound that doesn’t suit them that well.
Then again, it’s easy to see where some of that was coming from. Looking at the number of classics they have under their belt, their lesser moments tend to come from when they are rushed into the studio or told to put out a song that is incredibly flimsy, which is not what you want when creating what would be a classic.
Even when they do put their all into it, some of the biggest follies of their career come when the main ingredients aren’t working, and things start flying off the rails a little too much. There very well may be pieces of these tunes that could have been great songs, but we’re definitely hearing the most milquetoast version of them.
10 songs Foo Fighters should have never released:
10. ‘Sunday Rain’ – Concrete and Gold
By the time of Concrete and Gold, Grohl had fully mastered the art of leading a stadium rock band. Sonic Highways had brought them to the upper echelons and stardom, and while there are some shaky moments in that record, it still held together as a fine ride through the culture of American music. So while a back-to-basics record is all that we could have asked for, ‘Sunday Rain’ was a bit too basic than most were willing to go.
Although there is hardly anything wrong with the song, it sounds painfully average compared to the rest of the tunes on the record. Since ‘Run’ can stand aside some of the best material the band released in the 2010s, hearing them work their way through this dirge sounds like Grohl listened to the back half of In Your Honor and thought that the key was to sound incredibly bored throughout a song, which doesn’t help with Taylor Hawkins’s vocal delivery.
And even though ‘The Line’ is far from the greatest song on the record, it feels like a godsend once people dig themselves out of the lethargy of this tune. It might be interesting to have some muscle behind everything, but when Paul McCartney can’t add anything interesting to the tune, you know something is going wrong.
9. ‘Shame Shame’ – Medicine at Midnight
No matter how you feel about Foo Fighters, they always know how to start things off strong. Even if they don’t have the most consistent deep cuts, hearing something like ‘All My Life’ kick-off One By One or those first few moments of ‘Rope’ on Wasting Light, everyone knows they’re going to be in for some of the greatest rock and roll they have ever heard. So what the hell happened here with ‘Shame Shame’?
First of all, the premise sounds fantastic for a Foo Fighters track. Since the best parts of Wasting Light were about Grohl addressing his past, hearing him confront his own feelings of shame and doubt should be fairly interesting. What we get instead is one of the more basic drum patterns that they have ever laid down, as well as Grohl’s strange voice that sounds like he has something wrong with his throat.
While it’s nice to hear a band stretch out like this, seeing this as the first single for an album that’s meant to be a nonstop party feels like a buzzkill before it even gets started. Foo Fighters have always been known to bring the muscle behind every song, so seeing them pack so little a punch on their first try on this record makes it one of the worst leadoff singles for any of their albums.
8. ‘Summer’s End’ – Echoes Silence Patience and Grace
By the time In Your Honor, Grohl was probably wondering how the hell he was going to follow everything up. The last album was a strange conceptual piece taking both acoustic and electric guitars and putting them under one roof, so how would that sound if they were put together? The answer should have made all the sense in the world, but ‘Summer’s End’ was the first time they sounded a bit more middle-aged than usual.
Compared to the soft-loud dynamic on ‘The Pretender’ or ‘Long Road to Ruin’, hearing this blues-tinged dirge sounds like Grohl was trying to rewrite a tune from the late 1990s with far weaker riffs than he was used to. Although the melody is very pretty, the chorus is shot in the foot when it refuses to go anywhere outside of tacking on that signature riff at every musical turnaround.
There was still a lot of magic across the record, but hearing ‘Summer’s End’ is a scary premonition of what Grohl could sound like in another life. He has grown into the punk rocker that we all know and love today, but this is dangerously close to him going down the Michael McDonald route.
7. ‘Disenchanted Lullaby’ – One By One
From Grohl’s perspective, the less said about One By One, the better off he’ll be. As much fun as the band’s fourth album is from front to back, it’s understandable why their near-breakup put a damper on the frontman’s feelings towards everything. When looking at where his head was during ‘Disenchanted Lullaby’, though, it makes a little bit more sense where he’s coming from when he says the songs weren’t there.
Outside of the hazy atmosphere of the opening riff, there’s not much that the song has to offer in terms of a genuine hook. Even when getting to the de facto chorus of the album, hearing Grohl scream about feeling shattered sounds a lot weaker than what tracks like ‘February Stars’ offered a few years before, especially when he says what we’re all thinking when he sings about making everything stop.
While Foo Fighters used to be masters of the quiet-loud dynamic in their songs, this feels like going to both extremes and winding with a Frankenstein of a song instead of something that flows from start to finish. Considering how much Grohl hated working on this record, this is the moment where you start to feel that tension.
6. ‘The Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners’ – Echoes Silence Patience and Grace
One of the things most people could count on Grohl for was his heart of gold. Aside from being ranked among the greatest frontmen of the modern age, Grohl always looked out for his fans before anyone else, even inviting some people in off the street when working on ‘I Am A River’ on Sonic Highways. Although that kindness is why he’s so endearing, it can only go so far when it makes it onto a record.
When Grohl heard a story about miners being trapped underground and wanting a copy of Foo Fighters’ last record to pass the time, ‘Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners’ was his way of paying tribute to his fans. Even though it’s a nice gesture, it tends to break up the flow of Echoes Silence Patience and Grace, almost killing the momentum right before things hit their climax a few spots down the record on ‘But Honestly’.
And while the pull-off guitar pattern is one of the best performances on a Foo Fighters album, it sounds more like a strange idea for a song than something completely fleshed out. It might have been included to pay tribute to Grohl’s friends, but listening back to everything, it’s hard to really excuse it when the song could have been something great with a few words added and extended for another minute or so.
5. ‘Make It Right’ – Concrete and Gold
Any artist will want to go to Hollywood after they see the big time. Despite Grohl being a household name worldwide, Sonic Highways opened up his eyes to new forms of music, which meant he became the darling of award shows when the band hit the touring circuit. Since they were justifiably the biggest band in the world at this point, it was time to pull out the big guns on Concrete and Gold, but ‘Make It Right’ killed the momentum before it got started.
Right after ‘Run’ prepares us for one of the heaviest Foo Fighters records in recent memory, hearing it give way to one of the most faceless songs in their catalogue is a bit underwhelming. Compared to the other star-studded guests on the tracklist, adding Justin Timberlake to this song on backing vocals is either a gimmick to get people to check out the song or a stealthy way to cover up the fact that the tune doesn’t work that well.
And even if Timberlake did anything interesting, it’s hard to tell from how everything is mixed, with all of the backing vocals being pushed to the side or buried under walls of distortion. The idea of Foo Fighters trying to bring sexy back may have been one of the most horrifying images that most people had in their mind for this kind of collaboration, but most of us at least expected it to be a little bit more interesting than this.
4. ‘Medicine at Midnight’ – Medicine at Midnight
While Concrete and Gold was a mixed bag, it was far from the worst thing Foo Fighters had ever done. The whole album felt like it was meant to be toured, and looking at the massive numbers that they put up, it’s hard to deny that they were among the biggest names in rock at that point. So, after making an album that seemed destined for the stadiums of the world, how did ‘Medicine at Midnight’ fit into their plan for a party album?
Then again, it’s not like the title track of their next project is a terrible song at its core. It’s more about what’s around it, and when looking at tunes like ‘Making a Fire’ and ‘Waiting on a War’, there is far too little energy here than what the rest of the record means. As opposed to the other Foo Fighters ballads that have some punch to them, the fact that this tune refuses to get itself out of first gear is enough to put some of their biggest fans to sleep.
In Your Honor may have had sleepier songs, but when putting a tune like this right next to ‘No Son of Mine’, it feels downright disorienting watching each tune fight with the other in the mix. There’s nothing wrong with bands settling down as they get older, but never has a band been able to make a song and name it after the drug that their audience would use to get to sleep at night.
3. ‘Burn Away’ – One By One
The entire premise behind One By One seemed to be doomed before it even got started. The band weren’t happy about Grohl working with Queens of the Stone Age and leaving them in the dust, and once they finally kissed and made up, they ended up having to re-record everything again and starting from scratch. That doesn’t necessarily scream ‘fun’, but for a band known for relentless energy, ‘Burn Away’ is where the real fatigue starts to set in.
Which is strange talking about one of the louder tunes on the record. Tracks like ‘Tired of You’ had a much slower tempo and token guitar overdubs by Brian May, but looking at the chorus, it’s hard not to remember them doing this kind of song better before on previous albums, almost using the same kind of riff from ‘Live-In Skin’ off of There is Nothing Left to Lose and slowing it down a bit.
And by the time the cathartic ‘burn away’ chorus starts, even Grohl seems tuned out of everything, singing with the same conviction as someone looking at the clock on the other side of the studio wondering when lunch is. Most of One By One is at least salvageable, but if all of the songs had sounded like this, Grohl might have been better off starting from scratch again.
2. ‘Wheels’ – single
Foo Fighters were never a band that wanted to sell out to a major corporation. Despite being one of the biggest acts in the world and selling out every stadium they play, it still feels like they are making music because they want to rather than going down a road that some industry suit wanted them to go down. They did have to compromise at some point, and their Greatest Hits album does have an asterisk next to it with ‘Wheels’.
Even though it’s customary for every label to ask their act for one more song for a best-of collection, this is one of the most toothless songs Grohl has ever written. Compared to the lacklustre moments on Echoes Silence Patience and Grace, there’s hardly anything to the chorus, which is Grohl’s equivalent of listening to Tom Petty’s ‘Learning To Fly’ and making his own carbon copy of it from the ground up.
Which is strange considering that their other song ‘Word Forward’ is miles better and also serves as a touching tribute to Grohl’s best friend, Jimmy. That could have served as a nice bow on the album, but I guess the label was more interested in something that would make a decent soundtrack to sports highlights than something with some actual heart behind it.
1. ‘The One’ – single
The 1990s have always been the golden age for the movie soundtrack. Although Saturday Night Fever kicked everything off in the 1970s, it was insane to look at the run of classics that artists gave away to movies, whether that was the Singles soundtrack at the height of the grunge movement or Rage Against the Machine putting ‘No Shelter’ on the Godzilla soundtrack. Grohl could easily write to order when he needed to, but ‘The One’ is the least necessary piece of the band’s entire catalogue.
Written for the soundtrack to Orange County, this is the poor man’s version of what a Foo Fighters song sounds like. While Grohl might have been trying to capture the same type of energy that came with the wacky movie of the same name, this is far from the level of comedy that came from his run with Tenacious D, especially with a lyric sheet that should sound funny but reads as mindlessly dumb.
It’s not like the rest of the band disagreed, either, with Taylor Hawkins calling the tune one of his least favourite tracks they have ever worked on. Even The Beatles had to have songs that were workjobs, though, and for Grohl, this was the kind of track that he could write in his sleep, which he probably did, judging by the sound of it.
