His songs have made me happy since Scream, his first band, which he joined in 1986. Grohl has written for this magazine, and he and I are friends, though my love for his music predates our friendship by decades. Before I continue, an admission of bias: You are reading a fan’s notes, not an album review, so discount accordingly. But more to the point, it is filled with lyrics that feel true in their sustained confrontation with the album’s main subject: shattering absence.
The latest Foo Fighters album, But Here We Are, is a soaring, frenzied guitar attack whose songs often recall the band’s best stadium-shaking anthems.
Not that anguish and moody interiority are foreign to Foo Fighters-“I Should Have Known” and “These Days,” from the 2011 album Wasting Light, could be written only by someone familiar with the capriciousness of sudden loss-but mawkishness nevertheless threatened. I hoped for the best but was expecting something less. Not long after his mother died, Grohl told me that he was writing new songs-songs, he suggested, that would address, among other subjects, grief and mortality. Grohl is an unreasonably buoyant person, but it was hard to imagine how he would pull himself out of a trough dug by such concentrated loss.
Dave grohl unplugged plus#
She was, among other things, the ne plus ultra of rock moms, a teacher by profession whose support for her charismatic, punk-loving, unscholarly (her gentle word) son was unfaltering and absolute. And then, a few months later, Grohl’s mother, Virginia, died. Last year, Grohl, now the leader of Foo Fighters, lost his drummer, the dazzling Taylor Hawkins. Twenty-nine years ago, Dave Grohl, then the drummer for Nirvana, lost his singer, the band’s brilliant and vexed leader, Kurt Cobain.
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