“My voice is cracking”: The song that features Dave Grohl crying
Any great rock and roll song must come from an emotional place to truly move someone. No one can claim to make their living off of treating every single tune like it’s their day job, and sometimes the greatest songs ever written come from something they have to pull out of themselves rather than what comes naturally. While that might mean showing some dark sides of yourself, Dave Grohl knew that those are the ones that are always going to have an effect on people.
When first putting Foo Fighters together, though, Grohl knew that he couldn’t immediately jump into all of his internal pain. Everyone would have been dying to hear what he had to say about the death of Kurt Cobain, so half of the lyrics on the band’s debut album feature him making up gibberish lyrics to fit what he was singing, even if a tune like ‘Big Me’ was a silly love song and ‘I’ll Stick Around’ was a slight jab at Courtney Love.
Once he got his bearings as a songwriter, he knew the best way to work out his pain was to leave it all in the songs. He had been going through an ugly split from his wife in the late 1990s, and while not everything on The Colour and the Shape is about her, the singles feature the best memories of their relationship, whether that’s him getting frustrated on ‘Monkey Wrench’ or hearing him reminisce on the good times on ‘Everlong’.
While There Is Nothing Left to Lose saw the band starting at zero again after losing half the band, One By One wouldn’t be much better. No one was on good terms when they were making the album, and it’s hard not to get past that when listening through some of the deep cuts on the record, like ‘Halo’, with Grohl’s epic high note during the bridge sounding almost painful for him to hit.
Compared to all of the high-energy tunes on the record, though, ‘Tired of You’ is one of the most frail tracks on the record. For an album that was centred on being this massive stadium-sized project, this is where Grohl leaves nothing to the imagination, singing about him trying everything he can to keep his relationship afloat, even if it means wearing himself down to a shell of himself.
“There are times I listen to a song after we’ve done it and I get choked up. There’s a song on our new record called ‘Tired of You’, and I get really choked up.”
Dave Grohl
It’s easy for someone to beat themselves up in a song as long as they leave that emotion on the record, but Grohl said that the track was almost too much for him to take, saying, “There are times I listen to a song after we’ve done it and I get choked up. There’s a song on our new record called ‘Tired of You’, and I get really choked up. My voice is kind of cracking because I’m trying not to break down and cry in front of the microphone.”
For anyone listening to the song, though, the music practically makes tears well up for you. Brian May of Queen may have been a strange choice for a feature at the time, but as soon as those harmonised guitars kick in on the second half of the song, the whole track is given a whole different sense of melancholy. The first verse was Grohl realising his relationship is falling apart, and the guitars are the emotional reaction to everything.
But being able to wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t something to be embarrassed about when making a record. It’s a human strength to be able to feel that vulnerable in front of an audience, and even if Grohl did have to shed a few tears to get the right take, this may have been unintentional training for when he had to confront the death of his mother and Taylor Hawkins on the album But Here We Are.
