The songs Dave Grohl thought you should listen to instead of ‘Learn to Fly’
By 1999, Dave Grohl had grown tired.
With two Foo Fighters albums to his name, Grohl split from their record company and left Los Angeles behind him, headed for his native Springfield, Virginia, to reset and reevaluate with his bandmates, drummer Taylor Hawkins and bassist Nate Mandel. To pour salt in the wound, his longtime friend and guitarist, Franz Stahl, abruptly left the band after a year-and-a-half tenure. The Foo Fighters were left in a state of limbo.
Grohl had been through enough personal turmoil to last a lifetime: between the former Nirvana drummer’s loss of frontman and best friend Kurt Cobain and the crumbling of Seattle grunge, the Foo Fighters were a reprieve to keep Grohl’s creativity turning. Grohl had proved himself to be one of the most virtuous musicians rock had ever been blessed with. His unrivaled energy on the drums, without exaggeration, defined a generation and, as the Foo Fighters’ frontman, he showed that he could write introspective songs that packed a punch. Now, he needed another energetic shift.
Grohl only lived in Hollywood for one year, but saw right through its glamour. “Basically, I fucking despise this city. I think everything about it is just vile,” he told Kerrang!. “It seemed like what I call ‘the Hollywood element’ had started to dominate a lot of popular music, and that greatly upset me… Nothing seems sacred here. Music is something real and beautiful and it is fucking sacred, but it’s just being dragged through a trench of shit right now. The whole thing here in Hollywood about fame and beauty and the glorification of the celebrity just made me want to go fucking crazy and kill everyone.” Returning to Virginia signaled a fresh start. Grohl built his own studio, an insular world; fueled by technologies collected across the country—a mixing board from Nashville, a tape machine from New York—the Foo Fighters sent an electric shock through their systems to create music that could revive their spirits. Their 1995 self-titled debut and its follow-up, 1997’s The Colour and The Shape, elevated Grohl into a godfather of alternative rock, beyond his beginnings in Virginia hardcore band Scream and as the heartbeat of Nirvana. But in the midst of unrest, Grohl saw an opportunity to keep going.
Days spent in Grohl’s Virginia studio produced There Is Nothing Left To Lose, a collection of 11 tracks with intentionally raw sound—no autotune, no digitised sound, only old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. The album would go on to be a timeless favourite among fans, amplified by its first single, ‘Learn to Fly’. The song has an almost ballad-like quality to it; driven by Hawkins’ drumming, it tells the story of where Grohl had found himself, leaving the saturated world of fame behind. Now, Grohl can “make [his] way back home”, searching for a saviour before he “burns out”. Despite its poignancy, Grohl didn’t quite care for the song. “‘Learn to Fly’ is actually one of my least favourite songs on the record,” he revealed, showing more enthusiasm for the album’s opener, ‘Stacked Actors’ instead.
Certainly, the song dominates in intensity, a scathing critique of the Hollywood circuit Grohl found himself trapped in. “A song like ‘Stacked Actors’ just fucking kills, man!”, he enthused. “It opens the record with a sledgehammer. It’s us saying ‘fuck it’ again. Yeah, a blast of feedback and then a tuned-down Sabbath-on-speed type riff before blowing into this really weird calypso type thing with vocals that sound like Steve Miller.” The song goes especially hard in a live setting, as the steady build of each verse crashes forward into the chorus with an irresistible shout of “Hey, hey now!”.
Grohl also highlights ‘Aurora’, a slower song on There Is Nothing Left To Lose. A personal favourite, the song opens with an echoing guitar that is reminiscent of nostalgia, if it were a sound. Telling the story of a love that has grown cold, Grohl sings of his hopes to hold on to optimism in the face of grief, with lines like, “I just kinda died for you / You just kinda stared at me,” encapsulating a heartbreak. Grohl describes it as “trippy and beautiful and with a huge build-up at the end. That’s probably the greatest song we’ve ever written because it makes everything else just look like shit – in a good way, of course.” During current live shows, the song is performed in memory of Hawkins, who passed away in 2022.
There Is Nothing Left To Lose went on to win a Grammy for Best Rock Album, their first of four in the category. Beyond ‘Learn to Fly’, the album is packed with some of the band’s finest work. It stands as a powerful statement of their independence among their peers, their stripped approach to recording and unfiltered lyricism working in their favour.
