Why Dave Grohl thought his singing was “shit” before Foo Fighters
One of the biggest misconceptions about Dave Grohl when he was in Nirvana was that he was taking out all of his “teen angst” on his drum set.
Back then, there were many general misconceptions about the band, with some thinking that their heavier tones and lyrics were nothing more than depressive grumbles, which is why Grohl was merely an extension of that, and when things grew faster paced, it looked like he had let his frustrations run the show, wreaking havoc without any real musical technique.
All of that was, of course, a complete myth. As Grohl said himself during an interview in the early 1990s, it was mainly about having fun, while letting go of any “pent-up frustration” was more of a creative outlet because it was easier to express that way than to use words or be “articulate”, and Grohl had a different means of letting it out physically, as opposed to frontman Kurt Cobain, whose main conduit was his own voice.
Grohl, on the other hand, never really considered himself a singer in Nirvana, much less someone who could occupy the spotlight in the same way as someone like Cobain, and while he was subjected to the same fate as many drummers and became one of the more overlooked members of the group, beyond that, he was also rarely picked for interviews or framed as the leading spokesperson of the band.
He wasn’t, per se, but his position on the sidelines often made it seem as though he only had one respective role within the band, but, behind the scenes, he was constantly exploring his own capabilities beyond the drum set, creating demos and trying out different musical ideas to see whether he had anything worthwhile as a solo musician.
This is especially interesting considering that he went on to create one of the most genre-defining bands in modern history, but back then, Grohl had the seeds of ideas without necessarily the means to execute them. In his eyes, anyway. He knew how to make and record music, but wasn’t a singer, which meant that many of the demos he created, to him, seemed pretty pisspoor.
He probably hadn’t known at the time that many of these would end up on the Foo Fighters’ first record, but not before going through some major mixing and producing in the studio to get them into better shape. As he recalled to Zane Lowe, “Even before I was in Nirvana, I sort of figured out how to record songs by myself, right? So I’d do the drums first, put a couple of guitars over it, put a bass on it, and then sing over it.”
He went on, “But I never really played it for people, because A, I thought it sounded stupid, and B, my voice sounded like shit. So I would keep these things to myself, and they were just kind of this exercise with this experiment that I would do every once in a while.”
Most people would have felt discouraged if they thought their own recordings were that bad, and once Nirvana ended, Grohl was faced with the kind of disconnect that made him want to sit out of any future projects, but after Cobain’s death, he also felt lucky to have the opportunity to keep going, and so that’s exactly what he did, despite feeling like his demos weren’t up to standard.
More importantly, therefore, Grohl was still in it for fun, even when the stakes were high. He’d ventured into that studio feeling as though he sounded like “shit”, and still came up with the building blocks for a band as important as the Foo Fighters. His saving grace among all of that uncertainty wasn’t that he had anything special, but wanting to take a chance when it was there, no matter the outcome.
