A chat with Foo Fighters' Taylor Hawkins
Submitted by jstudent on Thu, 2008-02-21 16:06.Foo Fighters show musical growth, bring home a Grammy
By Alan Sculley / Philly EDGE correspondent
When the Foo Fighters released a disc of acoustic songs as half of the 2005 two-CD set, “In Your Honor,” it may have seemed like a one-off side trip away from the group’s usual brand of combustible plugged-in guitar rock.
But the disc, coupled with an acoustic tour last summer in support of that material from “In Your Honor,” has come to have a more profound impact on the Foo Fighters and its songwriter, Dave Grohl – liberating the group to pursue a more varied scope of music.
“I think that really made Dave feel like it will be interesting and fun (to diversify the sound),” Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins said in a recent interview. “We don’t have to do any one thing. We can spread out. We can do whatever we want. We can have songs with violins. We can have mellow piano songs. We can have our hard rockers. We can do kind of trippy, weirder songs.
“That’s just always an exciting prospect. I think there was that, for sure,” he said. “I think also there was the fact that we own our own studio, and it’s right down the hill from our houses. It’s just sitting there waiting for us and calling us. The combination between the tour, and the availability of having our own space to go and do whatever we want in at any time, it kind of (freed up the band).”
The Foo Fighters are set to play to a sold-out (check here) Wachovia Center Spectrum tonight at 8 p.m. Serj Tankian and Against Me! Open the show.
The group’s more open-minded musical outlook is apparent throughout its latest CD, “Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace,” which just won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Album.
To be sure, the CD features several songs that fit the band’s trademark hooky, hard rock sound, including the hard-charging chart-topping single, “The Pretender,” “Long Road To Ruin” and “Erase/Replace.” But nearly half of the CD brings fresh dimensions to the band’s sound.
“Let It Die,” for instance, starts out in a gentle acoustic mode before exploding into a full-on rocker (complete with some shredding screams from Grohl), while the psychedelic-tinged “Statues” and the graceful ballad “Home” find Grohl playing the signature instruments on these songs – piano. There’s even a brief trip into Appalachian-styled folk, “Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners,” that features playing from guest guitarist Kaki King.
“I don’t think he (Grohl) was still in the mindset that we had to still stick to a four-piece rock format,” Hawkins said. “I think that doesn’t seem as exciting to go into the studio and hear your songs just with us four as it does when, oh, we can do whatever we want now. The next record may very well be a rock record with just the four of us. You never know. And that’s the beauty of the situation now. People don’t expect a certain thing.”
Up to now, the Foo Fighters had been known for hard-hitting, catchy and concise rockers. The band’s biggest hits, “Monkey Wrench,” “All My Life,” “Best Of You” and “Everlong” to name a few, all fit that basic stylistic blueprint.
That sound also made sense considering Grohl’s background.
The Foos’ frontman, as most people know, first came to fame as the drummer in Nirvana, the groundbreaking rock band that helped define the early ‘90s “Seattle sound” and whose career was cut short in 1994 by the suicide of its singer/songwriter/guitarist Kurt Cobain.
What most people didn’t know at the time was that even before the Nirvana years -- when Grohl was a member of the punk rock band Scream -- he had started writing songs of his own. And even though he had justifiably earned a reputation as one of rock’s best and most powerful drummers, he had been playing guitar for years.
Those talents became apparent with the 1995 release of the self-titled Foo Fighters debut CD. The album, which was actually recorded almost entirely by Grohl himself, included the hits “This Is A Call” and “Big Me.”
Grohl then formed a first edition of the Foo Fighters with Sunny Day Real Estate bassist Nate Mendel, guitarist Pat Smear and drummer William Goldsmith. That lineup made what Grohl considers the first “real” Foo Fighters CD, the 1997 release “The Colour and the Shape.”
Featuring the hit singles “My Hero,” “Everlong” and “Monkey Wrench,” the CD solidified the Foo Fighters’ place as one of the best new bands on the modern rock scene.
Since then, the solid albums have kept coming (“There Is Nothing Left To Lose,” “One By One” and “In Your Honor”), along with a steady stream of hits. The Foo Fighters lineup also stabilized along the way. By the time of the group’s third CD, 1999’s “There Is Nothing Left To Lose,” Smear and Goldsmith had left, and guitarist Craig Shiflett and Hawkins had come on board, completing the group’s current lineup.
“It really comes down to the personalities, it really does,” Hawkins said, explaining the longevity of the current lineup. “It comes down to that more than it does to the actual musicianship or the players or whatever. It comes down to just being able to get along in a social environment and a work environment as well.”
At this point, the four band members are heading into new phases of their personal lives. Everyone except for Mendel is married, and the bassist has a steady girlfriend. All four band members have also become parents, and this has created a different sort of dual life for the four musicians.
“It’s like living two lives really,” Hawkins said. “One life is the home life, which is extremely normal. I mean, I have a new baby who’s like five months (old), and I trade off watching the baby and we watch the baby together, and we go out and we go to Home Depot and CostCo and the bookstore and all that kind of stuff. It’s really nice. It’s relaxing and awesome. Then you go on the road and you just work.”
On the live stage, the Foo Fighters remain an explosive, somewhat unpredictable, force.
“We’re loose live,” Hawkins said. “It’s not like we’re bad live. I think we’re really great live, especially when we’re well oiled. But we’re more along the lines of a (band like the) Who, I’d say. We don’t play everything album tempo. I speed everything up, as I tend to. We move and we don’t play to any sort of click track or backing tracks or anything like that. So what you see and what you get is really, in this day and age, an old-fashioned rock and roll show.
“Most people are playing to backing tapes because the technology has gotten to where you can and it sounds good,” he said. “I suppose most people who aren’t musicians or hardcore concert-going fanatics, don’t know the difference and just think it’s great. Wow, they sound just like the record, or whatever. We take a different approach. We’re a lot more wild. You take a song like ‘Learn To Fly’ or something like that, it completely gets transformed into altogether something else.”
The band’s first run of stateside dates in support of “Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace” is in arenas – a sure sign of the group’s enduring popularity – and will find the band playing a career-spanning set.
“It does pretty much pull from all over our catalog,” Hawkins said. “We touch on some of the early stuff and definitely all of the mid-period stuff, and we try to play as many of the new songs as we can because they’re always fun. We’re always testing out. You just figure out what works.”
