“I wrung it out”: The album Dave Grohl called the album of the century
It’s easy for many artists to get tied up in what their music will sound like in the future. As much as people like the idea of making music only for themselves, there’s always a lingering question over whether a song will still resonate years down the line or stick around for one summer and then be forgotten by the general public. As someone with as much experience as Dave Grohl has, though, it’s easy to write tunes people identify with as long as it manages to come from the heart.
Even if some people had a hard time figuring out what Grohl was even saying on the first Foo Fighters record, it was an important part of his healing process after the dissolution of Nirvana. No one cuts out that part of their life in one go, and listening to the way that Grohl was writing songs, it was clear that he took many of his lessons from Kurt Cobain’s writing style without even knowing it.
But the sound of Nirvana was never what Grohl wanted to base his career on. There had already been hundreds of bands that saw Nirvana as their main influence and wanted to make their legacy on the back of Cobain, but whereas that manages to work with bands like Bush for only a few albums, Grohl wanted to have a bit more energy behind his music when working on his later projects.
For the first time in a while, albums like The Colour and the Shape proved that rock could sound happy even in an era centred around melancholy. Most people were in the throes of depression and were willing to cry along with people like Aaron Lewis of Staind, but even if Grohl had a break-up song in his arsenal, ‘Monkey Wrench’ was the kind of tune that anyone could sing along without even realising that it’s about leaving someone on their ass.
Like all rockers that reach the end of their 30s, though, Grohl always came back to something a bit more rustic in his spare time. In Your Honor had already shown his proficiency to make something a bit more downbeat, but since he had to entertain stadiums of people chanting along to ‘Everlong’, he knew he would be okay with listening to acts like My Morning Jacket when off the road.
While the roots rockers aren’t remotely in the same ballpark as what Grohl had been doing, it’s easy to see what he heard in them. They seemed to be a throwback to the days of old-school folk-rock in places, and while they could still make blistering rock and roll tunes when they wanted, the focus was always on having the right song before they even bothered hitting record in the studio.
Later on, Grohl even considered their album At Dawn one of his favourites of the century, telling Q, “It’s like a classic Neil Young album. I listened to that one a lot. I wrung it out like a towel.” There’s definitely a touch of Young’s old tunes in there somewhere from the Zuma era, but most of their tunes are a love letter to all of the great Americana music that had come out before them.
The Killers had taken the heartland rock angle in the 2000s and ran with it, but there are traces of everything from Tom Petty to Bob Seger to Drive-By Truckers in the band’s sound for those willing to look for it. And while it’s remarkably much slower than anything in Grohl’s metal collection, it’s well worth a spin for anyone interested in something a bit mellow than what most people are used to.
Is it dad rock to a certain extent? Absolutely, but in this case, that isn’t a case of the record becoming dated in the slightest. This was a time capsule of what growing up was like in the 2000s, and whereas most people had genres like emo and pop-punk to fall back on, it’s sometimes better to have something with a little bit more grit in its delivery.
