The 1999 song Dave Grohl fell out of love with: “Too mellow”
Anything that Dave Grohl wrote in Foo Fighters was always going to be treated delicately once Nirvana broke up.
Everyone was trying to pick apart everything that he ever made and claim that it was about Kurt Cobain in the band’s early days, but when you listen to his other classics, he was simply trying to continue making rock music just like he had done when he was in his other band. But even if Grohl discovered a real knack for writing hooks, there were a few songs that ended up sounding way too soft for his taste.
Because when you think about Foo Fighters, ‘soft’ isn’t really one of the first words that spring to mind. Grohl wanted the chance to beat someone over the head from the minute that they heard ‘This is A Call’ for the first time, and even when he made something that could be considered a ballad, it’s not like ‘Everlong’ is exactly known for being the most gentle love song of all time. Everything that he made needed to feel like a shot of adrenaline, but even the biggest names in music need time to settle down.
And listening to In Your Honor, Grohl seemed content to ease things back a little bit on the flipside. No one would have thought that the same person behind a song like ‘Weenie Beenie’ from the first record would have been able to make something that sounded as beautiful as ‘Friend of a Friend’ or ‘On the Mend’, but maybe some people could have seen this coming when looking at their third record.
There is Nothing Left to Lose is a fantastic album in many respects, but it does stand out as one of the more mellow entries in the band’s body of work. That might sound insane for a record that has songs as caustic as ‘Stacked Actors’ on it, but even when looking past the singles like ‘Learn to Fly’ and ‘Breakout’, ‘Next Year’ is the kind of Beatles worship that Grohl is fantastic at, and ‘Ain’t It the Life’ was the kind of breezy rock and roll song that any 1970s soft rock band would have killed to make.
Then again, that might be part of the problem with the song as well. Grohl needed a more mellow tune for the lyrics that he was writing, but even for a song that was all about letting life roll by and imagining everything turning out alright, he felt that the song went from being one of his favourites on the record to one of the more grating songs that he had ever made.
He was still proud to have the song down on paper, but he didn’t think that it was anything special after looking back on the record, saying, “That’s what happens when you listen to too much mellow 70’s gold Fleetwood Mac type stuff while recording. ‘Ain’t it the Life’ sounds like an Eagles song or something, and I hate The Eagles.” Still, in terms of soft rockers, Grohl could have picked much worse than the California rockers.
There’s a reason why Hotel California and Rumours are still selling in droves, and even if the song is a bit toothless compared to what he had been working on before, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact, Grohl’s knack for hooks on a song like this may as well have been preparing him for the kind of songs that he was writing a few years later, once he started breaking out the acoustic guitars.
It was a hard pill for him to swallow at the time, but sometimes you need to make a song like ‘Ain’t It the Life’ to reach something like ‘Skin and Bones’. There’s a chance that the song isn’t really taking up that much space in the band’s setlist anymore, but the fact that Grohl managed to find his way to that mellow gold style of pop song showed everyone that he wasn’t a one-trick pony when it came to his tunes.
