The classic Foo Fighters song Dave Grohl thought was too ordinary: “Middle of the road”
Any artist’s worst nightmare is usually centred around getting bored with their own sound. It’s hard enough trying to put out tunes that leave part of one’s soul in the melody, but what happens when you wake up one morning and the one thing that gives you the most joy in the world suddenly isn’t fun anymore? That’s not a hard bridge for anyone to overcome, but Dave Grohl could admit that they couldn’t all be winners even when talking about Foo Fighters’ ‘Learn to Fly’.
Then again, what is successful for an artist isn’t exactly the vision that they have in their head. Even going as far back as The Beatles, there are many tunes that reach the top of the hit parade that they either considered filler or even mildly overrated by the fans, but ‘Learn to Fly’ shouldn’t belong in that company.
Compared to the amount of drama that had gone into making The Colour and the Shape, this was the sunniest track that Grohl could have ever put out. After all, he had finally settled down in Virginia and was making There is Nothing Left to Lose in his house, so he didn’t have to necessarily worry about the label banging on the studio door or anything.
If anything, this lead single feels like the inverse of ‘Monkey Wrench’. Whereas that was a kiss-off anthem with non-stop energy, this breezy slice of pop-rock is so non-threatening it could probably pass for adult contemporary music, but that’s precisely why Grohl had so many issues with it.
When being interviewed later for his collaboration album Probot, Grohl thought that the label picked one of the most pedestrian tunes that they had written for the record as the single, saying, “I was playing the song ‘Learn To Fly’ all over the place. It was the most fuckin’ middle-of-the-road pop song I had ever written. After a while, I started to go nuts. I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing, man? This is ridiculous.’”
It’s not like it’s the most inspiring ditty Grohl ever made, but when looking at everything else on that album, it’s easy to see why he had a problem with it being released. ‘Generator’ had a lot more pop-rock energy to it, and even though ‘Next Year’ and ‘Ain’t It the Life’ were still fairly mellow for what they were, they at least had some more personality behind them.
Or maybe Grohl was itching to play harder music before the record even finished. Because for all of the fun tracks on the final record, hearing him kick off the whole thing with ‘Stacked Actors’ is probably a good indication of why he spent the next year running away from Foo Fighters with Queens of the Stone Age on Songs for the Deaf.
Despite not cutting it by Grohl’s standards, ‘Learn to Fly’ still feels like a better introduction to what Foo Fighters are all about than any of their harder cuts. For all of its bland moments, there’s a good chance that some kid will hear this as their first Foo Fighters track and be blown away by the backlog awaiting them later.
