Who was the first female vocalist to feature on a Foo Fighters song?
Foo Fighters were never meant to have a set structure beyond Dave Grohl. He was the one who started the whole thing as a little pet project to recover from Nirvana, and the fact that he brought other musicians in felt like a way to get his material out on the road before developing into its own unique entity. While Grohl had many trials and tribulations trying to get everything off the ground, he didn’t get a female vocalist on a track until they hit on their all-time anthem.
Then again, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone without the last name ‘Grohl’ on the first album. The whole thing was made the same way that Stewart Copeland made the labrum by Klark Kent in the days of The Police, so no one was looking for Grohl to suddenly have a supergroup behind him.
If anything, that was the last thing on his mind. He had been in Nirvana, and while he was defiantly proud of those days, he didn’t want to look like he was riding the coattails of his celebrity status or trying to do anything that would be trying to piggyback off of what Kurt Cobain did, which is probably why Krist Novoselic never ended up joining the group.
Although Pat Smear did end up signing on when going out on the road, the lineup was still going through its paces when working on The Colour and the Shape. While it was clear that William Goldsmith didn’t have the feeling that Grohl wanted for the songs, it might have been because some of the wounds were still far too raw for him to part with.
Whereas the first album had him singing straight-up gibberish throughout every track, many of the pieces on this album feature the frontman dealing with his divorce from his first wife, including the kiss-off song ‘Monkey Wrench’. When talking about the good times on ‘Everlong’, though, they needed that little extra something, and bringing in Louise Post from Veruca Salt was almost too perfect an idea not to work.
The entire premise of the song is about two people singing together and finding some sort of connection, so hearing her singing along to the guitar lick in the background is the kind of detail that your brain notices before your ears do. That said, it’s not like Post was working out the details in the studio with them, either.
According to the engineers, Post wanted to do the song but was on the other side of the US, so the version that most people hear on the record is her singing through a phone line that was then plugged into the mixing console. Despite how unprofessional that version might sound in isolation, it’s perfect for the kind of tone that Grohl was going for.
The tune is still a love song, but listening to the rest of the album, it’s about a love slowly slipping away, and hearing her faintly over the overdriven guitars is as if the music itself is getting in the way of their connection. There would be many other guest vocalists on Foo Fighters records, like Norah Jones and even Grohl’s daughter, Violet, but hearing Post’s vocals on this is one of the most clever pieces of tone painting in the group’s catalogue.
