Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett is scheduled to play at Moe’s Alley on December 14 as part of a West Coast mini tour. He has revealed that he is currently doing van tours.
Chris Shiflett opens up on the matter
His solo tours, like the one that brings him to Moe’s Alley this week, are a whole different world than the stadiums he plays with Foo Fighters, sort of bringing his career full circle.
“It’s so different for me now doing van tours and gigs like this, because I don’t think I appreciated it when I was in No Use for a Name,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong. I loved it. I loved every minute of it. But I didn’t necessarily think about it in those days. I slept through just about every drive we ever did, so I felt like I missed that whole part of it. A van tour is a very different animal than being on a big tour. You see things differently—it’s more like a road trip.”
With a long period between the Foo Fighters’ 2007 record Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace and its 2011 follow-up Wasting Light, Shiflett not only recorded a second album with his brother Scott Shiflett for their side project Jackson United but he also made his first foray into Americana with 2010’s Chris Shiflett and the Dead Peasants. But with his solo records, 2017’s West Coast Town and 2019’s Hard Lessons, he discovered his sound and soul as an Americana singer-songwriter.
He also recorded over 200 episodes of his podcast Walking the Floor with Chris Shiflett, on which he talks to a range of musicians, many of them Americana artists like Dave Alvin, Robert Earl Keen and Steve Earle (he’s also interviewed those O.G. cowpunks John Doe of X and Mike Ness of Social Distortion).
