The heavy Foo Fighters song Dave Grohl considers his favourite: “The life I once had”
We all have our own ways of grappling with the meaning, or lack thereof, of life. Some people throw themselves into work. Others seek it out in love and friendship, in small moments of kindness or big grand gestures. Some of us ignore the question altogether until it creeps in uninvited while we’re trying to sleep under cover of darkness. And for the musicians, including Dave Grohl, the question often finds its way into lyrics and melodies.
Grohl first found success behind the drumkit for Nirvana, providing the pioneering grunge outfit with a balanced mix of intense, thunderous clashes and dialled-back drumming as required. He lent his talents to some of the band’s biggest hits, including signature track ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and the slightly moodier ‘Come As You Are’. The band came to an end in 1994 following the death of frontman Kurt Cobain, leaving Grohl to contemplate his new place in music.
After playing a brief stint with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Grohl decided to start a new project that would become the Foo Fighters. He spent the latter half of the 1990s dragging his grunge roots into new rock realms, carving out new genre classics like ‘Everlong’ and ‘My Hero’ while taking on the role of frontman rather than sitting comfortably behind the kit.
But even during his time with Foo Fighters, Grohl still reflected on and even wrote about those early years spent in Seattle’s DIY scene. There was one song, in particular, that pulled from his early experiences in the Washington city, and pushed into the meaning of life in the process: ‘Aurora’, which featured on Foo Fighters’ 1999 record, There Is Nothing Left To Lose.
‘Aurora’ paired gentle drums with gorgeous twangs and nostalgic choruses. “Hell yeah, I remember Aurora,” Grohl sings, “Take me now, we can spin the sun around and the stars will all come out.” The songwriter once described the track as “definitely one of my favourite songs that we’ve ever come up with.”
“Lyrically, it’s just kind of a big question mark,” he admitted, “But the words sound good and it’s a nostalgic look back at Seattle and the life I once had.” The title seems to refer to Aurora Avenue in Seattle, a street that Grohl didn’t live far from during his time in the city, but the song is more than a straightforward description of his life before the Foo Fighters.
The lyrics detail loss and longing, attempts to relieve emptiness and a yearning for an easier life. “You see outside yourself, and you buy the hole you’ll fill,” Grohl sings in a later verse, “But still, it’s on and on and on and on and on and on.” The song contemplates life and death, unafraid of intensity, and Grohl even described it as “probably the heaviest thing” he’s written.
“That song actually questions the meaning of life, probably,” he added. Although Grohl shrugged the intensity of the track off with a “probably”, ‘Aurora’ certainly does push into the weight of life and death, with imagery of dreaming and bleeding, of living and dying. The lyrics don’t necessarily find the answer to the meaning of life, but perhaps it’s in the memories that inspired the song, the friendships formed and music made during those years in Seattle.
