How trying to “understand” The Beatles helps Dave Grohl to write songs
The connection that Dave Grohl has to The Beatles goes beyond the realm of typical fandom. Like most musicians, Grohl grew up admiring the Fab Four, but when he began to learn how to play, his tastes quickly shifted to punk acts. Still, his love for pop melodies never left him, especially when his Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain publically sang the praises of John Lennon over the years.
Grohl got his chance to pay tribute to The Beatles when he joined the band, recording the soundtrack for the 1994 film Backbeat. Years later, Grohl got to collaborate with an actual Beatle when he and the rest of the surviving members of Nirvana wrote ‘Cut Me Some Slack’ with Paul McCartney in 2012.
While writing the Foo Fighters’ tenth studio album, Medicine at Midnight, Grohl consciously started his songwriting process in the same place that The Beatles often would: on an acoustic guitar. “I basically wrote all of these songs on an acoustic guitar,” Grohl told Guitar World in 2021. “As a drummer, when you’re jamming with someone, you watch their hand and the accent of the way they strum their guitar.”
“And what I do is I base the groove on the way a person strums a guitar – if the ‘up’ is harder than the ‘down’, if the ‘down’ is harder than the ‘up’, if there’s focus on the lower strings,” Grohl added. “I don’t read music, so I don’t know the proper terms for any of this shit, but I watch someone’s feel on the guitar, and I base what I’m doing on the drums from that.”
By that point, Grohl and Taylor Hawkins had a strong enough rapport that neither felt like they were stepping on each other’s toes. Grohl could write songs with drum parts already in mind, but Hawkins could create his own parts without having to be overruled by Grohl. Unfortunately, Medicine at Midnight would be the final album to feature Hawkins, who died a year after its release.
“So if I’m sitting on the couch doing this whole thing by myself,” Grohl says, “I’m already clicking my teeth when I’m playing, and I know, ‘Okay, here’s the groove of the song and here’s the accent. And this is the feel.’ So, a lot of the songs began with a specific feel more than a specific riff. It’d start with a kind of rhythmic foundation, and then I’d go from there.”
Grohl eventually found that melodies came more naturally when he took the same approach as the Fab Four. “To me, that’s the most important part of a song,” Grohl says. “And that comes from growing up with Beatles records and sitting down with a chord book, trying to understand why those harmonies do what they do and why the melody moves the way it does and why the composition and arrangement is like this.”
“That’s the Rubik’s Cube, right? Screaming bloody murder and playing as many notes as you can that’s fun. But to me, the complicated puzzle of braiding those things together in a way that seems simple is the greatest challenge,” Grohl states. “It’s like, ‘Okay, great, I’ve got a groove – that’s cool. I’ve got riffs – that’s cool. But none of it’s going to work unless there’s a fucking melody.’ And then you realize nobody’s going to care about any of it unless you’ve got a lyric. So now you add your words. It’s like baking a cake backwards.”
Check out ‘Shame Shame’ down below.
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