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— by James Montgomery
Dave Grohl has always been a bit of a risk taker. Back in the summer of 1990, he took a gamble by leaving a solid gig — drumming for D.C. hardcore act Scream — to join an underachieving Seattle punk band by the name of Nirvana, who would pretty much turn out to be the most influential rock-and-roll group of the decade.
A few years later, in the wake of Kurt Cobain's suicide, Grohl would roll the dice again, releasing an album's worth of tunes he'd written on his own, attempting to recast himself as a guitar-wielding frontman. The result was the Foo Fighters' self-titled debut, which would go platinum within a year, driven by radio hits like "This Is a Call" and "Big Me."
As the Foo albums kept coming, Grohl kept taking risks, letting members go (drummer William Goldsmith, guitarist Pat Smear) and penning darker, more complex songs. The records continued to sell, and the singles continued to hit, and somewhere along the line, Dave Grohl came to be known less and less as "the drummer for Nirvana" and more as "the lead singer of the Foo Fighters."
But after an underwhelming fourth album (2002's One by One), Grohl began to think that maybe the Foo Fighters had run their course. But rather than throw in the towel, he decided to take probably the biggest risk of his career: he'd make not one, but two new Foo albums, package them together and see what happened.
The end result is In Your Honor, which many consider the band's best album, but with its wildly differing sides (one hard-rock, one mellow), it's also the one that might alienate the most fans. But if you think Dave Grohl is worried about that, well, then you haven't been paying attention.
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MTV: So, why'd you decide that it was time for the Foo Fighters to push the boundaries and release In Your Honor, a double album, in an era when attention spans are shorter and iPod playlists are longer?
Dave Grohl: We'd made rock records for 10 years — and it's fun to do, and I love rock music so much — but at some point you want to try something new to breathe new life into the band. You surprise yourself because there are no expectations. And honestly, I think this whole band has been a risk, from day one. It was a demo tape that turned into a band. I had never played guitar and sang for a band, and I just decided to do it. I look at the whole thing like it's been one big, long, scary experiment. And I like it that way. I don't consider us to be some hugely popular rock band. I consider ourselves to be a bunch of friends that have been doing this for a while, and we don't really feel like we fit into one little community. But we have our own little world, and sometimes it's on TV, and sometimes it's not, but it's always scary. That's what makes it fun.
MTV: On some deep-down level, aren't you a little nervous that maybe Foo Fighters fans might find Honor to be a bit hard to swallow? I mean, it seems like your fans have certain expectations about how a Foo album should sound.
Grohl: Yeah, but we don't take outside expectations into consideration. I think that ruins bands and it ruins records. If you let everything else fall away, and you build your own studio and you go in there and make a record by yourself, you focus on the music and that becomes the main focus. I mean, sure, you hear songs and think, "Wow, that sounds like something you'd hear on the radio!" But you don't write them for that reason, they just sort of turn out that way. The less you think of what's going on outside the studio, the better what's going on inside the studio is.
MTV: You mention the studio you guys built. But that was just one of a bunch of changes this band went through in recent years — rehab, marriages, the works. What has the past year or so been like, the time leading up to this album?
Grohl: We had our seven-year itch three years ago. Right before we went to record One by One, it was like, "Have we expired? Should we keep going?" And we actually had a bit of trouble making that record. We did it once, threw it away, and then went back and recorded it really quickly. But that record and all the shows we played for that record really solidified the band, just because we went out on all these tours — the biggest shows we'd ever played — and the biggest audiences and singalongs. And that made us realize that being in this band is something that we didn't want to be without. Something that we'll try to do as long as we possibly can. So I never thought that this record would be our last album, I just thought it would be our best.
MTV: So would it be fair to say that making In Your Honor has recharged the band?
Grohl: Oh, absolutely. Making this record revitalized this band. The acoustic side really pumped a new energy into the band, and it makes things scary again. You do something that you've never done, and it makes you feel like a bigger band. This record also ensures more longevity for the band, because with the acoustic record, it really did blow doors open for the band. ... We showed ourselves what we're capable of doing. We've made this new territory that will someday become familiar as Foo Fighters music, and that's a beautiful thing.
MTV: A lot of the songs on this album are really dark, really emotional. What was going on in your life when you were writing this album?
Grohl: Writing lyrics is strange, because they come out of nowhere. I don't know what it is about, this album, that makes it sound more heartfelt or deeper or more emotional, but when I listen to it, it really is. But it wasn't just new songs. A lot of the songs on the acoustic record are older. That song that Norah Jones is on, "Virginia Moon," is eight years old, but it never made sense on any of the records we'd made previously. There's a song, "Friend of a Friend," that's 14 years old. It's hard to put an acoustic song in the middle of a rock record, because sometimes it mucks up the sequence.
MTV: So how did a band like the Foo Fighters, 10 years into their career, find the motivation to make a record like In Your Honor? Where did the drive come from?
Grohl: The idea is just to make music and make good records. There's not so much career ambition as there is personal ambition. When you make an album, it's a lot more personal than just making product and shipping it out and crossing your fingers and hoping it sells a bazillion copies. When you go in to make an album, you want it to be better than the last, you want it to be the best thing you've ever done, and you want to stretch yourself musically. So the drive comes from wanting to do something you've never done before and something that's better than anything you've ever done.
For more double-LP action, check out the feature "Music Geek: Are Artists Who Make Double Albums Egomaniacal, Delusional Freaks?"
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Photo: MTV News
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