DAVE GROWL SERIES

Did you keep playing them that way, especially, like, in punk bands, where you really wanted to cut through? It's, like, the rounded end that you're supposed to be hitting the drums with and not, like, the thick end. And the teacher, who was a jazz musician, said, hey, you're holding the sticks backwards. You know, in your memoir, you write that you had one drum lesson. GROSS: So I have a drumstick question for you. GROHL: So - but this particular chord? No clue what that is, no idea. GROHL: I do know that it's in D (laughter). GROSS: So being self-taught, if I asked you what chords you just played, would you say, I don't know? But I'm a really good rhythm guitarist because I look at it like it's a drum set, you know?

And I've always been a very - I'm not a soloist. So it makes the sound sort of, like, blossom into this crescendo. And then the cymbals, when the song opens up, you let the other strings ring out, like (playing guitar). But with a guitar, it sounds like (playing guitar). On a drum set, it would be doo-doo da-doo da-da doo-da doo-doo da-doo da-da-da (ph). So if you imagine the lower strings are kicks and snares, that's where you get a pattern like this. But I do look at the strings on a guitar like it's a drum set. So I don't really have any formal sense of theory or scaling or anything like that. I almost look at the strings on a guitar like the different drums in a drum set. I guess that's what comes naturally to you. You know, you started as a drummer, and, you know, you can hear a very percussive, rhythmic style in your guitar playing. That was the basic idea of the whole song. The only thing I'll ever ask of you - got to promise not to stop when I say when, she sang. And I wonder when I sing along with you if everything could ever feel this real forever, if anything could ever be this good again. Tonight, I throw myself into and out of the red, out of her head, she sang. It's a very simple riff that sounds like this. And I said, hey, I think this is a song that we should record. So I wrote this simple riff and put the song together, probably in a day and went and demoed it by myself, brought it back to everybody. And the feeling of the deep connection between two people where it seems so good that you hope that it never ends, even when you ask for it to stop, that you hope it continues. And it was at a time in my life where I was coming out of a relationship but still feeling love and falling in love.

So by way of introduction, tell us what this song means to you in your life.ĭAVE GROHL: Well, I wrote this song, I think, in 1997. But this is also a song that's obviously very meaningful to you, as well as to your fans.

David Letterman had you and the band do it when he got out of the hospital after his heart attack because it was so helpful during his recovery. And so I'm going to ask you to start one, and this might be your most popular song. So I asked you if you could play a few song excerpts for us, and happily you agreed. GROSS: Dave Grohl, thank you again for coming. We recorded this interview at a live Zoom event. McCartney went on to describe Foo Fighters as one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands in the world.ĭave Grohl has a new memoir called 'The Storyteller' that's now on top of The New York Times bestseller list. He didn't put together the band until after recording that album. Even though he recorded it by himself, he did it under the name Foo Fighters. For Grohl, that was the first Foo Fighters album. And McCartney and Grohl were faced with the question, what do you do now? Each of them answered by making an album in which they played all the instruments themselves. He said they each joined a group - for McCartney, it was the Beatles for Grohl, Nirvana. The induction speech for Foo Fighters was given by Paul McCartney, who made several comparisons between his life and Grohl's. The first time Grohl was inducted was as the drummer for the band Nirvana. The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year.

DAVE GROWL SERIES

Today we conclude our holiday week series with the interview I recorded last month with Dave Grohl, founder of the band Foo Fighters.

Dave growl