The album Dave Grohl never wanted to release: “That’s not really a Foo Fighters song”
Not every song a rock star writes is meant to reach the ears of the public. As much as it might have the potential to be a hit single, there are sometimes those tracks that are a little bit too personal to put out into the world, lest everyone see the side of you that you would rather keep under wraps. Although Dave Grohl feels more like an open book than almost any rock star that came before him, he admitted having some trouble putting out In Your Honour for the first time.
Until this point, Foo Fighters had been the kind of band that spent most of their time turning their sound up to 11. Even though they had the closest thing to a ballad in their arsenal with ‘Everlong’, even that track brings in the booming guitars throughout the verses and manages to keep you on the edge of your seat throughout the breakdown of the track.
Despite getting a little softer on albums like There is Nothing Left to Lose, songs like ‘Stacked Actors’ kept the band in touch with their heavy roots, sounding like something that could have come off a Kyuss record. When working on In Your Honour, Grohl had two sides of himself in the studio and felt it was time to show both of them.
While the first disc is typical of what you might expect out of the Foo Fighters at this point, the second disc is a completely different animal. Rather than make an MTV Unplugged show, this is all new material primarily on acoustic instruments, including some of Grohl’s greatest lyrics on efforts like ‘On the Mend’ and ‘Friend of a Friend’.
Once he had enough tracks to work with, Grohl was still a bit lenient to put them out, telling Sam Jones, “I’d write something beautiful and delicate, and I’d say, ‘Well, that’s not really a Foo Fighters song’. I thought for years that what we did was very specific, and I didn’t really want to go outside of that because I thought it was the perfect place to have it. Then I said, ‘Let’s see how broad of a playing field we can work into.’”
While In Your Honour is definitely a heavier listening experience than anything the group has ever made, it still has the best music of their career. Songs like ‘Best Of You’ have etched their way into the memory of every single rock fan in the world, and even the sleeper singles like ‘No Way Back’ are among the best straight-ahead rockers in their catalogue.
It’s not like Grohl couldn’t adapt to the softer side, either. Compared to the traditional unplugged scenarios where artists just play their tune on an acoustic with the same amount of energy, songs like ‘Still’ and ‘Another Round’ sounded like they were always meant to have that kind of shimmering quality to them, especially on the former with Grohl’s amazing melody over the top.
If anything, the fact that Grohl had the guts to make something like this helped fuel him to make something even more ambitious when he made albums like Echoes Silence Patience and Grace and Sonic Highways, each of which marked a major departure from the band’s usual comfort zone. It all still sounded like them, but Grohl knew that if he wanted to keep growing as a musician, he needed to find ways to spice things up every time he made a new record.
