All His Life

The Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl is always between rock and a hard place

Comments (0) By Mikael Wood Wednesday, May 28 2003

"Going back to the Foo Fighters and making a rock record, it was, like, 'Oh, now this shit's rocking. And there's melody to it? Yeah, that's Queens of the Stone Age,'" Grohl snorts dismissively. "You know what? Go buy the fucking first Foo Fighters record, listen to a song like 'Weenie Beenie' or listen to a song like 'Exhausted.' Whatever.

"The reason why it's heavier than the last one is because each record is sort of a response to the last. For [Nothing] we wrote all these mellow mid-dynamic songs that don't really have anything to do with the distortion pedal, and [we] had a great time recording them in the studio in my basement. Then we went out on tour, and we only played maybe five or six songs off that record. So this album, it was, like, 'OK, we gotta make eleven songs that we're gonna play every night.' And we were writing as a band in a little tiny room, so those are the kind of riffs that come out; those are the kind of songs that we enjoy playing when we're writing. It was about pleasing ourselves and feeling like we've gotta make a record that's gonna make us happy for the next two years on the road."

The Foo Fighters just can't stop.

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They've evidently done that. Grohl says that he begged his management for a single month free of band goings-on, but, after four days without playing, he was "seriously frustrated," itching to work again. "I just can't stop," he laughs; then he pauses: "But that's good, right?"