Born January 14th, 1969 in Warren, Ohio, Dave Grohl would go on a quite unique and interesting path to becoming a two-time inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. After he dropped out of high school to drum for the band Scream, Grohl began a long and ever changing career as a musician. Grohl’s claim to fame and success didn’t begin with Scream though. After it disbanded, he was invited to audition for the open drummer slot in an up-and-coming Seattle-based band, now widely beloved and famous world wide, Nirvana.
After Cobain’s 1994 suicide, Grohl was offered several other drumming jobs, including working with artists like Tom Petty, but decided to pursue his own solo project: Foo Fighters, its name cribbed from a World War II phrase for U.F.O.s. He ended up playing every instrument on what would become the group’s 1995 debut album and recruited the ex-Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear, as well as the bassist Nate Mendel and the drummer William Goldsmith to form a touring band. Grohl also made some fundamentally different business decisions based on that experience: All of the band’s records are released through Roswell, an RCA subsidiary, allowing the members to retain the rights to their music and share songwriting credit.
Yet despite their success, Foo Fighters wasn’t always a perfect band by any means. “A long time went by where each album could have been our last,” Grohl said. They nearly split while recording the 2002 album “One by One,” during which they scrapped the entire record amid an escalation in interpersonal tension. That was the first time we’d really hit any kind of roadblock,” Mendel said. But that fighting nature wasn’t what Grohl wanted out of his new band. Above all, Grohl believes in the unifying power of music. Creating a space where people can come together and scream to feel something. As he explained it, everything the band has done, and continues to do, stems from this very clear purpose.
So how does Grohl write music that “unifies people”? Well, in an interview Grohl was asked “So you don’t write songs to try to get on top 40 radio?” To which he replied “No. I don’t think we’re allowed there! Do I expect to knock Cardi B off the fucking charts? Absolutely not. No, I kind of write songs for the stage or a setlist, and I write them for Foo Fighters fans.” In a separate interview, Grohl stated, “There are songs that are very specific, and there are songs that are written with a very general emotion in mind. Sometimes I’ll write a song that’s so vague that an audience will sing along for 16,000 different reasons. I’d hate to exclude someone from a song because it’s about someone they don’t know”.
Grohl started writing his own songs when he was 11 years old. However, unlike many musical artists, Grohl didn’t have any formal musical lnowledge. “One of the blessings of not knowing what I’m doing is that I surprise myself,” he says. “Like, I don’t know conventional scales. I don’t know the names of the chords that I’m making.” Yet despite this lack of formal training, Grohls music has been wildly successful. The all-time Alternative chart included the Foo Fighters’ “The Pretender” at No. 5 followed by “All My LIfe” (No. 46), “Best of You” (No. 81), “Walk” (No. 99), “Rope” (No. 138), “DOA” (No. 162), “Let It Die” (No. 232) and “Learn to Fly” (No. 267). Grohl’s previous band Nirvana had five entries in the top 300, the highest being “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at No. 21.
So how does an self trained musician rise to musical stardom? For Grohl, music is equally a way of life as it is a job. “I just want to stay alive and play music, especially after Nirvana,” he said. “When Kurt died, I truly woke up the next day and felt so lucky to be alive, and so heartbroken that someone can just disappear. I decided to take advantage of that, for the rest of my life.” Grohl took this love of life and musical talent and turned that to his song writing. Grohls musical abilities grew over time due to his self described obsession with music, saying “After doing that for hours and hours and hours every day, you start to notice the subtleties in the arrangements, or the shape of a composition, or the different types of harmonies, and then the lyrical qualities of each song,” Grohl says. “So just through total obsession, I started to form this idea of how music is made or should be.”
As for Grohls songwriting process, he derives his creativity from both intrinsic and extrinsic movtivators. Inspiration is a massive piece to Grohls music as he says, “Well I guess, once you feel inspired, it’s easy. There’s never really any blueprint, you just come up with ideas here and there.” He continued saying, "It’s really hard to try and write, it’s easy when it’s easy. I never want anything to sound too contrived or forced, it has to really just feel natural. I don’t feel like I’m an incredible song-writer that makes these incredible rock records. I’m humbled by the whole thing and I just sort of cross my fingers and hope that it sounds okay, or that people will dig it, or my band will dig it.
For Grohl the band is as big as the music itself. “When Nirvana ended, I was in a deep, deep rut emotionally,” Grohl says. “I didn’t know if I wanted to play music anymore, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be a drummer anymore. So I just turned to that old habit of recording things on my own and thought, ‘All right, maybe I’ll do this in an actual recording studio.’ I booked six days at a place down the street from my house in Seattle and recorded what became the first record without having much expectation.” As he had done on his first recordings as a child, Grohl played all the parts himself, but “I called it ‘Foo Fighters’ because I wanted people to think it was a band.” He in a seerate interview said, “I didn’t want it to feel like a solo project. I didn’t want it to feel like this is my backing band. I wanted that same feeling that I had in every band I’d been in, where it’s a collective, it’s a group, and we do this together.”
Even after all the success, the Foo Fighters and Dave Grohl continue to release new music. In an interview about their latest album Grohl said, “It was like, ‘Okay, what haven’t we done? Well, we haven’t really done the dance thing yet. We’ve made albums with these big, heavy riffs—what about groove?’ All of us grew up listening to early funk and Bowie and bands that managed to play rock music that you could shake your ass to. I was like, ‘God, we’ve never really done that! Let’s go for it!’ With that sense of hopefulness and his musical prowess, grohl continues to look for inspiration to create music that can impact the world around him
https://www.clashmusic.com/news/foo-fighters-reveal-creative-process
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/dave-grohl-advice-to-songwriters/
https://americansongwriter.com/dave-grohl-rock-roll-storyteller/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/arts/music/foo-fighters-dave-grohl.html
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