Dave Grohl discussed a concept idea he originally had for Foo Fighters’ new album Concrete and Gold in a new Evening Standard interview.
Grohl first had to rein in his ambitions, then ramp them up in a different way. “I had this idea that I wanted to write and rehearse an album, then build a recording studio on stage at the Hollywood Bowl and invite 20,000 people to watch us record,” he says.
Then he realised that P.J. Harvey had done something similar on a smaller scale, at Somerset House in early 2015. Plus it felt like a bit much when the band’s 2011 album, Wasting Light, had been accompanied by a feature-length documentary, and the follow-up, Sonic Highways in 2014, was also an HBO TV series exploring the musical history of eight US cities and required Grohl to interview everyone from Dolly Parton to Barack Obama.
“I think we were getting too creative with our ideas of how to make an album,” he admits. “What if we were to focus just on the music rather than some hyper-conceptual nightmare?”
