KEY POINTS:
NEW YORK - Instead of all-night throwdowns in the studio, the four Foo Fighters competed in a beard-growing contest this year while making their new album, Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace.
And instead of boozing it up with record company execs, frontman Dave Grohl greeted guests for a recent album playback while swinging his baby daughter Violet in his arms. Drummer Taylor Hawkins admits he's in bed by 10 pm these days too. ("My wife and I watch a 48 Hours Mystery and I never see the end," he says.)
But if the Foo Fighters have dispensed with the rock 'n' roll lifestyle offstage, they're more committed to the music's possibilities than ever on Echoes, their sixth studio effort.
The band named have even written a song for two Australian miners who captured world attention by surviving for 14 days deep underground after a cave-in at a gold mine.
Tasmanians Todd Russell and self-proclaimed Foo fan Brant Webb will be pleased with the the instrumental Battle of the Beaconsfield Miners (a guitar duet with Kaki King) which makes it onto the album.
While trapped in the mine last year Brant Webb requested an iPod with Foo Fighters music be passed into the mine. Grohl also sent the miners a message promising to buy them a beer when they got out. He did just that when the band toured Australia in October.
The new album, Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace, due September 25, finds the Foos once again teamed with producer Gil Norton, who was behind the boards for 1997's The Colour and the Shape (their best seller to date, at 2.13 million US copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan).
"We've been a band for 13 years. Album after album, we've tried to redesign what we do," Grohl says. "Not reinvent, but just make it all a little prettier. We wanted to experiment and go deeper melodically. The first record to me sounds like it could have been a garage hardcore band. The idea now is to step it up and make (the Zombies') Odessey and Oracle" (sic).
Exploring melody
The band's music began heading down a more nuanced route on 2004's In Your Honor, which featured a disc each of rock and acoustic songs. Then, in 2006, the Foos took an expanded band out on an acoustic tour, a jaunt chronicled on the live CD/DVD Skin and Bones.
"After that tour, I finally realized the melodic possibilities hidden in a lot of our songs," Grohl says. "We had been kind of caged by the fact we were just a four-piece band. With additional instrumentation, which we'd never really experimented with before the last album, we could take songs from ground level to soaring heights."
As such, Echoes sports songs that shift from fingerpicked acoustic guitar intros to speaker-shredding rock riffs in a matter of seconds. Hardcore Foo Fighters fans will feel most at home with explosive tracks like first single The Pretender and Erase/Replace. But what stands out most are the true departures, like the instrumental Battle of the Beaconsfield Miners (a guitar duet with Kaki King), the acoustic Stranger Things Have Happened (recorded in a hallway with a metronome audibly clicking in the background) and the closing track, Home (primarily Grohl alone at the piano in the grand tradition of Freddie Mercury and Queen).
"Gil is heavy on preproduction," Grohl says. "The first two weeks I just sat with him around the table and talked to him about arrangements, harmony and melody. Once we narrowed it down from 40 songs to 20, we went and sat in a rehearsal space for about four weeks. We got deep. We'd play a song a day, and I mean a song a day, from noon to midnight. By the time we got to tracking, we were like f---ing Bad Brains -- the tightest band in the world."
Grohl's willingness to bare his feelings on record is another sign of his evolution as a songwriter, but at times he hit nerves a little too close to home.
"Stranger Things Have Happened, I don't even listen to that song," Hawkins says. "I'm one of his best friends, and the last thing I want to do is read a love letter to his wife or whoever it is. But at the same time, if it was someone I didn't know, I might internalize it deeply, and it might be part of my life and something that I think about when I think of my wife."
Throughout the album, there are numerous left-field musical references to Band on the Run-era Paul McCartney, the Eagles and other softer-rocking relics of the '70s. "There will be times when you hear it and you'll go, 'Wait a second. Was that Bread?' It's a trip," Grohl says.
"I don't mean to sound lame or pretentious, but it was so fun to go through these sort of long musical journeys and incorporate all these different dynamics," Hawkins adds.
And if you believe the band, the beard-growing was fun, too. "I kept mine, but I trimmed it down a little bit. I was looking like Dennis Wilson in his homeless period, hitchhiking on the Pacific Coast Highway with a bottle of orange juice and vodka in his hand," Hawkins says. Grohl adds, "I look like Billy Gibbons now. My wife is a saint."
Not just a one man band
The Foos' embrace of complex songwriting is a far cry from the band's 1995 self-titled debut, which Grohl recorded completely by himself in the months after Kurt Cobain's suicide brought a sudden end to Nirvana. After surrounding himself with the former rhythm section of Sunny Day Real Estate as well as guitarist Pat Smear, he slowly returned to the live scene by opening for Mike Watt on a celebrated 1995 club tour.
Commercial success was nearly instantaneous, with the debut going platinum-plus and spawning three top 10 Modern Rock chart hits. But the band was constantly changing personnel and didn't settle on its present incarnation -- Grohl, Hawkins, guitarist Chris Shiflett and bassist Nate Mendel -- until 1999's There Is Nothing Left to Lose.
By then, the Foos were a juggernaut at retail and on the radio, and an arena-level draw. Their album sales have been almost scarily consistent, with Nothing Left having shifted 1.269 million, 2002's One by One at 1.273 million and In Your Honor even better at 1.34 million.
The Foos are thus one of only six bands in the Nielsen SoundScan era whose first five major-label studio albums have all exceeded platinum. Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, Green Day, System of a Down and Korn are the others.
And their song catalog features some of the most enduring tracks on rock radio (Everlong, My Hero, Learn to Fly, All My Life, Times Like These), where they've scored 13 top 10 hits and four No. 1s.
To top it off, the exceedingly good-natured Grohl has become one of the most sought-after pinch-hit drummers in the biz, working on recording projects by Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, Tenacious D and Killing Joke, among others. Even his metal-obsessed side project, Probot, sold 142,000 copies of its self-titled 2004 album for micro indie Southern Lord Records.
After some one-off shows this summer in the United Kingdom, the Foos will play US gigs in September and October, followed by arenas in the United Kingdom in November and Australia in December. Another US run is on tap for early spring.
On tour, the four extra musicians used for the Skin and Bones trek will be reprising their roles.
"On the first four records, there was an economic approach," Hawkins says. "We didn't use any keyboards or any outside musicians. We never would have thought that we would have taken it this far. I mean, we all know we're not reinventing the wheel in any way, shape or form. But we're definitely reinventing the wheel as far as the Foo Fighters go."
- REUTERS/Billboard/NZHERALD STAFF
