Taylor Hawkins once picked the best song Dave Grohl wrote
The late Taylor Hawkins was a party to most of Foo Fighters‘ brilliance. He joined the band in 1997 after making waves as the touring drummer for Sass Jordan, Alanis Morissette, and the prog-rock group Sylvia.
It was Hawkins’ work with Sass Jordan, which started in the early 1990s when he was just 22 years old, that would pave his way into the Foo Fighters towards the end of the decade. Hawkins later said of her importance to his career with the Dave Grohl-led group: “Sass taught me how to be in a rock and roll band and gave me my first rock and roll check.”
Furthermore, in 2015, Hawkins was reunited with Jordan onstage at a Foo Fighters show in Toronto, covering The Faces’ song ‘Stay With Me’. Before tearing into the track, Grohl echoed Hawkins and told the audience: “If it weren’t for Sass Jordan, Taylor Hawkins wouldn’t be in Foo Fighters”. Regardless, when he joined the band, he was ready, and unsurprisingly, this would coincide with the start of their most lauded and creatively fruitful era.
The first full Foo Fighters album that Hawkins played on was There Is Nothing Left to Lose, which, broadly speaking, saw them move into a more experimental, softer area than its hit predecessor, The Colour and the Shape, on which he appeared on three songs. The 1999 record is one of the group’s most cherished efforts by fans and features a host of favourites, including ‘Learn to Fly’, ‘Breakout’, ‘Stacked Actors’ and ‘Aurora’. The latter Hawkins deemed one of his all-time favourite Foo Fighters songs.
“I love that side of Dave,” Hawkins told Matt Wilkinson on Apple Music of ‘Aurora’. ”I love it when Dave gets in his almost yacht rock softness in his voice and he double tracks his voice really nice”.
The song also held other significance for Hawkins, as he explained: “That was the first drum track that I ever did for the Foo Fighters that I was really, really proud of because I only played half the drums on the ‘…Nothing Left To Lose’ record because it was my first time in the studio, and I was just… I didn’t know how to record.”
Hawkins was a big fan of Grohl’s candid songwriting side. In a deleted scene from the Foo Fighters documentary Back and Forth, Hawkins expressed his love for another of the frontman’s more heartfelt compositions, ‘These Days’, from that year’s Wasting Light. He believed the material was so good that he described it as maybe “the best song” Grohl had written. Notably, it features some of the vocalist’s most unapologetic lines and opens with: “One of these days, the ground will drop out from beneath your feet / One of these days, your heart will stop and play its final beat”.
Hawkins said: “It’s just one of those songs that he came in with… ‘So I had this other’, and he plays us ‘These Days’ all the way through, and it’s like, ‘Oh, really, that’s just another one? ‘Coz that’s the best song you’ve written almost ever’.”
Watch Hawkins discuss ‘These Days’ below.
