Celebrate their 25th anniversary this year, the Foo Fighters had so much planned to celebrate the achievement. But then the novel coronavirus hit.
Now, the tour has been postponed, and the band is doing what they can to keep in touch with their fans like sharing vintage live footage.
Dave Grohl recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly about how the global pandemic changed his role from touring musician to stay-at-home-dad.
“Right now I’m in such a daddy-domestic headspace that even just calling to do an interview is strange, because what is there to talk about really?” he told Entertainment Weekly. “But we do have this arsenal of material ready to fuckin’ dam-burst all over the world, and it’s just a matter of figuring out when the world is ready because I think that’s a little more important than the Foo Fighters.”
Aside from cooking some Cincinnati chili for dinner, Grohl has taken up writing — from recounting crazy moments during his career in his ongoing Instagram series Dave’s True Stories to a thoughtful piece for The Atlantic.
“Most rock musicians are great storytellers, this is true,” he said when asked about potenitially writing a memoir (He did say YES!). “Because most rock musicians have spent more than a few hours in the back lounge of a bus spinning yarns, swapping stories about all the different people they’ve gotten wasted with or jammed with. So there aren’t too many rock musicians that are short on great stories.”
And while the Foos aren’t making new music at the moment (though the album is reportedly almost done), he was very happy that Fiona Apple dropped her new record, Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
“I mean, thank God for the new Fiona Apple record! It’s beautiful, and it’s been a long time coming,” he said.
Then when asked about livestreaming and how technology has helped artists perform. Grohl admitted his analog tendencies, which led to a story about how he found out that the BBC was coordinating an all-star cover of the Foo Fighters’ 2002 hit song, “Times Like These.”
“…I was so flattered you have no idea, I almost cried,” he admitted. “I mean for them to use a song that I had written on a f—ing napkin at a difficult time in my life where I was scared but I was also hopeful, for them to use that song for such a good cause and then to bring together all of these amazing artists, I was fucking humbled you know?”
He then talked about how he got involved and said. “So they had already started the process of people filming themselves singing verses and choruses. And they didn’t necessarily ask me at first to sing the whole song but they were like, “If you’d like to sing a verse or a chorus, we’d love to have you.” So I’m watching these performances come in and these people can fuckin’ sing — our version is like Motörhead at a dive bar down the street, and this is beautiful.”
And while he was excited, he realized that he didn’t know a key piece to filming his portion of the video.”…they told me ‘Just make sure you film yourself in landscape,’ and of course being the old guy, I don’t even know what landscape is,” he said. “So I just sent them the up and down version, it was mortifying.”
In the end, Grohl was asked about his outlook on the live music climate to which he said, “It will come back. I honestly believe that at some point, people will come back outside into the sun and want to share music together — I mean it’s human nature I think. Who knows how long it will be but fuck, we’ll be there. I know that.”
