Dave Grohl Describes His Presence in Nirvana ‘Anonymous’
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has made an interview with NPR recently and talked about lots of things, including his past experiences with Nirvana. Grohl also talked about their latest album with Foo Fighters and what happened after it delayed.
Grohl opens up to NPR while looking back on his stressful days in Nirvana. He tells how it made him feel to be superstardom so sudden and quick in just a few months. In the meantime, the talented musician also expresses he was actually feeling anonymous in Nirvana, which is really cool for him cause it actually helped him.
After being had to delay their upcoming album and tour which were set to happen in 2020, Foo Fighters are finally promoting their album “Medicine at Midnight.” Normally, last year was going to be so special and big for Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl says since it was the band’s 25th anniversary. So they had planned a huge tour and new album to celebrate it. And just after everything was ready and set to go, the pandemic has started, so Foo Fighters decided to delay everything after all. But after waiting up almost a year, you can now finally find their tenth album on the shelves or platforms, thankfully.
So, Dave Grohl tells about how “Medicine at Midnight” came together in the first place, along with his perspective on fame after more than 25 years.
Nirvana’s “Saturday-night party album”
Dave Grohl describes the band’s 10th album as a Saturday-night party album and a sound that they hadn’t explored until then. “When Greg and I got together to make this record, the intention was pretty clear,” he says. “It was like, ‘Let’s make some rhythms and some grooves that people are going to bounce around to.’ ”
Grohl also explains how it was supposed to be if things were normal during the past year.
“Well, we knew that this year [2020] was gonna be a special year for the band because it’s our 25th anniversary. We started the band in 1995. … We wanted to make our 10th album to celebrate all of that. We had planned a world tour. We had made a few different documentaries. We had made videos. The trucks were packed; the T-shirts were pressed. Everything was ready to go. The album was finished. It was mixed and mastered.
By February, we thought that 2020 was going to be the biggest year that the band’s ever had. And then, of course, things just stopped. At first, we just wanted to make sure everyone was safe and healthy and we all went our separate ways and just waited, you know? We would have these meetings about once a month just to check in and see if it was time to rev up the engines and start the machine. But eventually, we realized that this was going to be a long break.”
On the other hand, most of us know that also Dave Grohl‘s daughters also are talented at music. So, it’s not also a shocker that Grohl’s daughter Violet has put a vocal to ‘Making a Fire’ from her dad’s latest album.
“Well, Violet wasn’t formally invited to be on the album. We didn’t record this record in the studio; we recorded it in an old house, down the street from where I live. I would pick up Violet on the way home from school, and we’d come to this house. She’d sit on the couch and do her homework. And one day Greg Kurstin, our producer, knowing her ability, said, “Hey, Violet, do you want to put a vocal on something?” And she said, “Yeah, sure.” So she stepped in front of the mic and did a couple of takes. And that was a song called “Making a Fire,” the first song on the record.” Foo Fighters frontman explains how that happened.
Nirvana’s unexpected and fast rise affects
Dave Grohl also opens up about how he felt back in days as Nirvana had risen up so fast to the top that their lives became upside down. The beloved old bassist of Nirvana also explains how he managed to walk so lightly over all of that fame and others.
“When Nirvana first became popular, I was 21 or 22 years old. And, you know, I was a kid. Before that, all I wanted to do was to survive playing music. Really, my biggest aspiration was, you know, to have an apartment! … I never imagined that things would turn out the way they did. I never imagined Nirvana would become so popular.
I just didn’t, you know? At the time, that type of music just wasn’t commercially accessible. It wasn’t popular music. It was underground music. And when the band first became popular, it happened at a frightening speed. It was within a month or two that we went from being relatively unknown to being number one on the charts and a name that everyone recognized. So at that age, at 21 or 22 years old, that’s a lot to process. And if I ever felt overwhelmed, I would just go back to Virginia. I’d go back to the house where I grew up and I would go hang out with my friends from high school and stay in my neighborhood until I felt grounded again. And then I would go back to Nirvana.
Now, that being said, I was the drummer of the band. I surely was not at the forefront or in the spotlight; Kurt Cobain was.”
Dave Grohl back those days, and being behind of the group had actually helped him:
“I felt pretty anonymous in that band. I was lucky, that I could avoid a lot of the dark corners or the pitfalls – but at the same time, reap a lot of the benefits of that. I mean, I bought my first car. I bought an old Ford Falcon Futura in 1963. That was it for me. I was set for life. I had a car. And it was that simple then.”
“And then, of course, when Nirvana ended, I was stuck in a place that I wasn’t entirely sure how to get out of. I didn’t want to play music. I didn’t want to just join another band. I didn’t necessarily want to sit behind the drums ever again. But I eventually realized that music had always been that thing that had healed me or comforted me, and that was going to be the thing that saved my life again.
I would always record music by myself in a basement studio, playing all the instruments and making these experimental demos – just for fun – just some sort of creative outlet. And I decided to lean on that. I decided to go into a studio and record some music by myself, almost, you know, in some sort of therapeutic way, just to exercise a lot of the pain or the sadness. I looked at that as some kind of continuation, not necessarily musically, but just in life — emotionally. And that was the beginning of the Foo Fighters. And still, to this day, it’s what the Foo Fighters represent to me.”
You might also want to take a look at Grohl’s other interview about him and the rest of the Nirvana members still jamming together.