With Foo Fighters fresh from the release of their 12th studio album, Your Favourite Toy, Dave Grohl is looking back on his decades-long career.
Specifically, he’s reflecting on his roots with Nirvana – and how the pain that came with Kurt Cobain’s death, plus the band’s end, led to a whole new guitar-driven chapter he didn’t necessarily expect.
“There was a time once, when Nirvana ended, where I'm like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do music anymore… that hurts,’ and I'm like, ‘No, what am I talking about?’ That's the thing that always saved my life,’” he says in a new interview with the Broken Record Podcast. “I have to do it.”
Grohl also touched on his transition to Foo Fighters and being the sole songwriter in his then-fledgling post-Nirvana project.
“Time went by where I was just like, ‘God, what do I do? If I sit behind the drums, it makes me sad. If I listen music, it makes me sad,’” he says. “Then I wrote songs – [like] when I was a kid with those stupid journals. I wrote my way through it.”
Adamant on not becoming just another drummer-for-hire, Grohl re-acquainted himself with the guitar – the instrument he had started out with and served as his companion since age 10.
“When Nirvana was on tour, I'd bring a guitar with me," he told Guitar World in a 1997 interview, “so in hotel rooms, late at night, I'd have something to do. I love playing the drums, but you can't really sit down at home with a snack and play the drums.
“So I've never been without a guitar. Eventually, I was living with a person who had an 8-track in the basement. And these songs just started coming out.”
In more recent news, Grohl revealed why he never expected Pat Smear – who, back then, was Nirvana’s touring guitarist – to accept his invitation to join the band he was going to call the Foo Fighters.
