Seventeen years after their formation in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain’s suicide and the subsequent breakup of Nirvana, Foo Fighters have never been bigger. With a new album, Wasting Light, set for release in the U.S. tomorrow (April 12), a new documentary recently released by Oscar-winning filmmaker James Moll, titled Back and Forth, and a world tour on the dockets for the summer, frontman Dave Grohl has been placed in the somewhat uncomfortable position of dredging up darker moments of the past on his current promotional junket.
“I remember reading an interview with [Washington, D.C. punk legend] Ian MacKaye, where he was talking about nostalgia and how unproductive it can be,” Grohl told the Washington Post. “When there’s so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you’ve already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days? And that really affected me, because he’s right. It’s the reason we started Foo Fighters… We started it to [expletive] get away from the past. After Nirvana ended, it was the one thing healing us from the heartbreak of losing a friend and a band.”
Grohl says the band were grilled by the press after their very first rehearsal: “What the [expletive] would we have to talk about after one rehearsal other than the past?” he pondered. “We [didn’t] even have a silly tour anecdote yet.”
All of these disparate moments have come together in the new album, Wasting Light, which reunited Grohl with Nirvana producer Butch Vig and former bandmates Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear.
“I was basically writing about the experience of being surrounded by family and friends and Butch and consumed by memories,” Grohl said. “And doing it in my garage, there’s something full circle about that. After everything that we’ve been through, we’ve managed to take this band to a place that we never aspired to be.”
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