“Such a genius”: Why Dave Grohl called Norah Jones the nicest woman in rock
It’s almost expected that every single rock star has the potential to be a jackass at some point. While many people in the music industry have been nothing less than genuine whenever they make music, others have let their egos get to their heads more than a few times in the past. And while Dave Grohl shed that skin long before he even joined Nirvana, he knew to surround himself with people who were equally genuine about their craft whenever he could.
Because listening to Grohl’s music, he saves a lot of his anger and frustration for his songs. Any good songwriter can see their craft as an excellent outlet for them to air out their grievances, and when looking at everything from ‘Monkey Wrench’ to ‘I’ll Stick Around’, Grohl had a fair amount of baggage to get off his chest whenever he made his records, whether that was the fallout of Nirvana or his marriage.
But around the 2000s, he became a far more approachable presence than anyone else in rock and roll. Although the music industry has put him up on a pedestal most of the time for being everything that a rock star should be, it’s not like Grohl isn’t coming from a genuine place. He wants to be the best artist he can, and that means knowing when he screwed up or doing everything he can to make people in the nosebleed seats feel like they’re down at the front of the stage.
And that extended to when he wasn’t playing the most intense music ever. No man can manage to play heavy riffs for the rest of his life, so when Grohl started to work on In Your Honor, he knew that he wanted to take things down a notch once he had written the second disc, which was full of the kind of introspective ballads you’d find on the back half of Led Zeppelin III.
Grohl would need some more help than his band, though, and while Josh Homme and John Paul Jones did everything they could on their respective songs, there was a much different feeling when Norah Jones walked into the room. She had come from the world of jazz, and listening to her play on ‘Virginia Moon’ was a breath of fresh air thanks to her knowledge of different chords that Grohl would have never considered.
And despite being viewed as one of the nicest people in the mainstream, Grohl felt that Jones more than earned the right to be the nicest woman in rock, saying, “She played on our last record, and I was so surprised at how pleasant and normal she was for being such a musical genius.” Then again, the greatest artists of all time don’t normally have to call attention to themselves, either.
Looking at the song ‘Virginia Moon’, not a lot of the jazzy bits tend to jump out at people on first listen. It fits together as a decent Foo Fighters ballad, but whenever someone tries to play the thing on guitar, it gets a lot harder to figure out what the hell they were doing to make the whole thing work properly.
Grohl even ended up picking up a few tricks from Jones as well, eventually making some strange melodic choices when working on the next album, Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace. Although no one’s exactly itching for Jones to show in the middle of one of Foo Fighters’ stadium shows, her reputation is enough to put her on an even keel with Grohl as the most pleasant musician to hang around with in the industry.
