“One of the heaviest”: Dave Grohl names the sweetest melody he ever made
Melody is often one of the most overlooked aspects of any classic rock band. There have been countless jam bands that base their tunes over a simple theme and keep adding layers to it, but there’s a certain art that comes with taking the basis of a few notes and turning them into something special whenever the next chorus comes in. Although Dave Grohl never fashioned himself as a professional songwriter in his Nirvana days, those subliminal lessons from Kurt Cobain certainly rubbed off on him in Foo Fighters.
Before Grohl even started showing his songs to Cobain, though, the Nirvana frontman had always emphasised keeping things incredibly simple. The unspoken rule was to make everything sound almost like a children’s song in many respects, and that meant Grohl playing fewer fills than usual so that his lines would become instantly recognisable rather than sounding too cluttered.
While a lot of Foo Fighters’ early output was about him trying to find his own voice in front of a microphone, it didn’t take him long to start making some truly beautiful material. ‘Walking After You’ was already one of the breeziest songs that he ever wrote back in 1997, and once the band were paired down to a trio for There is Nothing Left to Lose, ‘Next Year’ became one of the most Beatlesque melodies that Grohl had to offer.
If that kind of song worked once, then In Your Honor was Grohl’s excuse to make a lot more mellow music when putting out the acoustic disc. A lot of people may not have expected the band to make an entirely unplugged album, but after getting both sides of themselves out of their system, Wasting Light felt like they were taking every aspect of their music and channelling it into one package.
Despite the garage rock roots of the project, the band’s 2011 album is pretty close to their finest work in the 1990s. Now that they had Pat Smear back in the group, they finally had come full circle and made the kind of record that was both a love letter to their past and pointed the way toward their future. And on ‘A Matter of Time’, Grohl felt that he had finally found a way to put all of his favourite sounds under one roof.
The order of the day may have still been based around epic riffs, but Grohl called it one of his finest melodies, saying, “There’s a song called ‘A Matter Of Time’, which is one of the sweetest melodies I’ve ever written, but it has one of the heaviest riffs.” Although ‘These Days’ may have been given a greater priority, ‘A Matter of Time’ does a better job at saying it all for the record.
The whole process of the band making the album on tape in Grohl’s garage may have been as punk rock as it got. However, compared to the heavy songs like ‘White Limo’, tracks like ‘Bridges Burning’ helped carry on the same massive choruses from Echoes Silence Patience and Grace, and ‘A Matter of Time’ fits right in the middle of both of them as a cross between hard rock and power-pop.
Although there’s a certain homecoming feeling that comes with returning to Wasting Light, Grohl was never thinking in those terms when making a record. He was only interested in turning in the best album he could, and by keeping in that spirit, he created an album with the most passion of any of his classics.
