Dave Grohl wrote many songs that later appeared on Foo Fighters’ first album during his days with Nirvana, but he didn’t present too many of them to Kurt Cobain to become Nirvana songs.
Alternative Nation transcribed Grohl’s comments to the Chart Beat podcast, “When I joined Nirvana I had a basement studio at my house in Seattle. During breaks in-between touring I’d record things by myself almost in a therapeutic way, to keep the muscle moving. when you’re in a band like Nirvana, you don’t necessarily want to introduce your music into the grand scheme of the music.
When you’re in a band with the greatest songwriter of our generation, you don’t want to stroll in the cassette and say: ‘Hey, I have a song I think we should play.’ We have some pretty good songs already, so I was just kind of hiding these things away in my basement.
Once Nirvana was over, I wasn’t sure what to do, so I [kind of picked] 12 or 13 of the tons of songs I’d recorded, and decided to do it properly in an actual recording studio down the street from my house. I spent 5 days and made 100 cassettes, and just kind of gave them to people, and that’s when it turned into a band.”
On Foo Fighters’ HBO series Sonic Highways in 2014, Grohl did reveal that he played Cobain “Alone + Easy Target.”
“Kurt heard that, and kissed me on the face, as he was in a bath,” Grohl revealed. “He was so excited. He was like, ‘I heard you recorded some stuff with Barrett [Jones].’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He was like, ‘Let me hear it.’ I was too afraid to be in the same room as he listened to it.”
