Dave Grohl on the song that “defined everyone in the world’s life”
Each of us has an inbuilt playlist of songs that have defined our lives in some way or another. That tune you waltzed around the living room to while standing on your dad’s feet as a kid. The song that accompanied your first kiss or first dance. The setlist to the first gig you ever attended. These life-defining moments become tied to the songs that soundtracked them, curating a subconscious playlist of nostalgia-inducing tracks.
The beauty of this phenomenon comes from its intrinsic subjectivity. No two people will have had their lives defined by the exact same songs. Many of us may share ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams as our karaoke song of choice, and countless couples have walked down the aisle to Elvis’ ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’, but we have each forged our own intimate connections with these songs, our own life-defining playlists.
Still, former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters leader Dave Grohl believes that there is one song that unites us all in this way, one song that just might find its way onto every single person’s subconscious playlist. Perhaps expectedly, his pick comes from the biggest band of all time, Liverpudlian four-piece The Beatles.
Most people will have a moment or a memory linked to a song by the Fab Four. Their songwriting has continued to resonate with generations of listeners since the heyday of Beatlemania in the 1960s, from love songs that still find their way into wedding services to experimental tracks that have become defining influences for budding bands.
There are a number of Beatles tracks that could be considered for the title of universally defining, but Grohl’s pick comes from their masterfully experimental 1966 record, Revolver. But rather than picking the baroque pop of hit ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or the sample-based psychedelia of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, Grohl went for the most playful track on the album, ‘Yellow Submarine’.
A song that would endear itself to children just as much as Beatlemaniacs, ‘Yellow Submarine’ fused the band’s psychedelic interests with simple lyrics about sailing up to the sun in the titular vehicle. What could have been a throwaway novelty song, a mere exercise in curiosity, quickly became a symbol of The Beatles. It also had a defining impact on Grohl, an impact he believes may well extend across the globe.
“I really think that that song has defined everyone in the world’s life at some point,” he once shared during a conversation with Rolling Stone, “or just become a moment.” For Grohl, this was emphasised by a moment he shared with his young child when they both sang along to the song.
“I’m sitting there singing the song with my five-year-old,” he remembered, “and we’re singing it I think for the same reason, even though we’re 45 years apart.” ‘Yellow Submarine’ certainly does have the ability to urge anyone, young or old, to sing along to its lyrics. Beautifully simplistic, bright and catchy, they seem to appeal to all demographics.
While many of us won’t necessarily have experienced a moment of close familial bonding soundtracked by ‘Yellow Submarine’ by Grohl, it is the kind of silly and sentimental song that most people will have some connection to. Perhaps The Beatles weren’t exaggerating when they said, “We all live in a yellow submarine”.
