The one Foo Fighters song Dave Grohl impressed himself with: “That’s my favourite thing we ever recorded”
When Dave Grohl first got the ball rolling as a songwriter, there was no chance of him selling a million records or anything.
Before Nirvana, the idea of an unassuming kid being able to play rock and roll was unheard of, but after all of the hair metal bands were properly stamped out, it was time for him to start looking for other outlets once Kurt Cobain passed away. Foo Fighters may have been a musical canopy to put over his head for a while, but once he started building a career out of it, there was a lot more that he had to offer than headbanging tunes.
Because as much as we give Foo Fighters for being one of the few respectable post-grunge outfits, they don’t really fit that label. They did come out after grunge and had one of the members of one of the genre’s foundational bands, but there were also moments like ‘Monkey Wrench’ and ‘Everlong’ that felt more like standard rock and roll with a bit less pretentiousness behind everything.
And when they made a turn towards radio-friendly rock on ‘Learn to Fly’, it felt like that was where they were most at home. Every record was going to have its fair share of surprises, but most fans could always count on tunes like ‘Times Like These’ or ‘Long Road to Ruin’ to pick everything up when everything got a little dour. But when it came to In Your Honor, Grohl needed a change of pace.
The sessions for One By One nearly destroyed the band, and now that he was licking his wounds, he didn’t really want to spend the next record making balls-to-the-wall rock and roll all the time. There was a certain size and scope to what he was writing, and while people were more than happy with the first disc of the record, the acoustic flipside was like him hitting the reset button on his career.
The Foos could now be more sentimental, and it wasn’t until Grohl landed on ‘Still’ that he felt that he could make that jump, saying, “That was the first song we did. When we listened back to it, I remember saying, ‘That’s my favorite thing we’ve ever recorded’. It’s beautiful, and it was so new to me. It’s about a kid who sat on the train tracks in my hometown in Virginia and committed suicide. I remember we rode our bikes to the park that morning, and there were all these ambulances and shit. It’s heavy, man, but you know, I was listening to the music, and that’s what it was.”
But beyond being a great song, what mattered was how it was going to fit into the Foo Fighters’ oeuvre. Before making ‘Still’, there was no chance that Grohl would have featured a tune like ‘Virginia Moon’ on a record with Norah Jones singing backup, but since the rest of the band were ready to go along for the ride, he had found that creative golden ticket to guide him to the next phase of his career.
Because if you look at Echoes Silence Patience and Grace, each song sounds like both pieces of In Your Honor smashed into each other. A lot of them may come together with a pretty audible clunk, but whereas some of them don’t work as well together, hearing ‘But Honestly’ start with one acoustic guitar to the greatest crescendo of the group’s career is proof that they could make that kind of dynamic work perfectly.
It may have simply been another tool for the toolbox at the time, but when Grohl had to face the serious problems later on in life, he was lucky to have had a record like that under his belt. Because if he hadn’t made tracks like ‘Friend of a Friend’ or ‘On the Mend’, it would have been a lot more difficult to deal with the death of Taylor Hawkins and his mother on But Here We Are years later.
