Team Rock have published an article where Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins’ discuss Foo Fighters’ formative years. Below is an excerpt:
When the Foo Fighters’ self-titled debut album arrived on shelves in July 1995, its cover depicted the band’s name above a photograph of a gun. Considering Grohl’s former bandmate had shot himself to death only 15 months earlier, the choice of cover image might appear to some to be tactless. “Yeah, people kind of freaked out on that,” admits Grohl, whose love of sci-fi had led him to choose the picture of the Buck Rogers toy gun. “You know, honestly, that never came to mind once. Obviously it didn’t, because if I thought people would associate that with that, I would never have done it.”
He later discussed recording In Your Honor.
Inspired by Tom Petty’s solo work on She’s The One in the mid 2000’s, Grohl considered doing a soundtrack. “So I started demoing all this acoustic music with that in mind. After an hour or two of listening to it, I thought, why can’t this be a Foo Fighters record? Maybe we should do this kick-ass mellow acoustic record. So I thought maybe that’s what we should do. And then I thought no, I have to have loud rock music in my life somewhere.”
Faced with reconciling an acoustic album with Grohl’s need to have “loud rock” in his life, the Foos frontman came up with a solution. “Why not make two CDs?” he thought.
Why not indeed? Nine years and four albums had given Grohl the confidence and licence to do whatever he wanted. “I eventually want it to get to the point where when people ask me what kind of band I’m in, I say: ‘I just play music’. It’s not one specific genre of music, it’s not one specific style. I’m just a musician. I can play all these different instruments, I can write a bossa nova, I can write a thrash tune. It’s such an incredible freedom. That was the point of this album.”
