The classic Foo Fighters track Dave Grohl thought “wasn’t any good”
Musicians are never the best choice when it comes to picking out singles. They got into the business to make the music, not be A&R men, so it is sometimes better to get an outsider’s perspective whenever putting together a promotional package for a record. Still, you’d think that Dave Grohl would have known the power behind ‘Best of You’ before he almost canned it going into the recording of In Your Honour.
But for a record as massive as Foo Fighters’s fifth outing, they would need all the tracks they could get. This was the enormous double record that would show both sides of Grohl’s personality, so getting 20 songs that were good enough to be put out meant that there was no room for filler, either.
While the record’s second side was some of the most gentle music the group had ever made, the first was the massive stadium record that rock musicians always dream of making. From the opening seconds of the title track, the band put you in the centre of the arena with just their instruments before Grohl’s vocal comes in, sounding like he’s pleading with his audience to scream.
Amid all of the demos that they were working on, though, there was one half-finished idea that Grohl had been working on. The chorus of the song was definitely intact, but since there was only half an idea there, Grohl initially considered ditching the song because he thought it wouldn’t have worked on the record.
When talking to NME, Grohl said that he was looking to just come back to it on another record so it could be fleshed out, saying, “I wrote the lyrics for it, and then we shelved it because we didn’t think it was any good. And our manager comes in and says, ‘What’s that song that says, ‘the best of you’ 100 times? Just pound it into their heads!’ And we’re like, ‘Really?’”
And at the risk of stomping on someone’s favourite song, I kind of see what Grohl was going for. Since the first single was supposed to be ‘No Way Back’, ‘Best Of You’ would have seemed a little bit more meatheaded by comparison, especially considering the fact that the song has now become a borderline meme because of how many times Grohl sings the one line of the chorus.
Then again, sometimes the most simple songs are the ones that actually get people chanting along in a stadium full of people better. Paul McCartney didn’t write ‘Hey Jude’ thinking that there would be crowds of people singing the chant-along at the end, but since it’s only a few melodic lines, it’s easy for so many people to feel connected to it.
If anything, ‘Best Of You’ might actually end up being one of the quintessential Foo Fighters songs in that respect. ‘Everlong’ might objectively be their best, and tracks like ‘Learn to Fly’ and ‘The Pretender’ can still get millions of fans on their feet, but ‘Best of You’ has both the heart and the aggression of what Grohl is all about in one package.
