The Foo Fighters song written as a joke
Dave Grohl was in for an uphill battle when he started the Foo Fighters. Although he may have been in one of the biggest bands on the planet in the days of Nirvana, he needed to start back at square one, making songs for his amusement in a studio across the street from his house. While he would eventually turn himself into one of the most prominent frontmen in the world, Grohl never claimed to take himself too seriously.
As far back as the first Foo Fighters record, Grohl would talk about coming up with lyrics on the spot because he couldn’t think of anything else. As such, most of the lines on the band’s debut album have little to do with one another, being incoherent nonsense compared to the more emotional lyrics he would pen later on tracks like ‘The Pretender’.
Although the rest of the band would help fill out the sound on The Colour and the Shape, the group underwent a drastic change once recording wrapped up, with Pat Smear and William Goldsmith quitting as the band took to the road. After firing replacement guitarist Franz Stahl, Foo Fighters put their next album together as a trio, with Taylor Hawkins and Nate Mendel joining Grohl for There Is Nothing Left to Lose.
Without the commitments of being in a big-budget recording studio, Grohl worked out of his basement studio to assemble the entire record, crafting one hit after another like ‘Learn to Fly’ and ‘Next Year’. While the recording was going well, there was one song that started as a complete farce.
When working on the band’s track ‘Breakout’, Grohl had assembled one of the sturdiest choruses the band would ever commit to tape, bridging the gap between the post-grunge of the past few years and the power pop that was arriving in the late 1990s with the emergence of acts like Fountains of Wayne. Despite the love song in the music video, Grohl would say that the song originated from a joke about kids who get acne.
Discussing the meaning behind the track, Grohl would say that the song was tongue-in-cheek from the beginning, telling Songfacts, “‘Breakout’ started off almost as a joke, just a play on the word and taking the piss out of your typical tortured romance love story. It’s supposed to seem kind of ridiculous because I can’t imagine anyone wanting to break off a relationship just because they have acne”.
While Grohl meant for the entire song to be a satire of the traditional love song, the massive hook behind the chorus made it impossible to get out of the listener’s head. For those who didn’t know any better, the song could be about a guy whose lover drives him crazy to the point where he has to break out of whatever situation he finds himself in rather than into acne.
Aside from the single, ‘Breakout’ would become a concert staple for the band for the next few years, with the group performing it heavily on the road once they got new guitarist Chris Shiflett into the mix. Grohl may have started the song off as a joke, but often, the best songs can come from the craziest ideas.
