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the-punforgiven · 6 years

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1-49

Ayyy, thanks!

music asks!

This is pretty long so I’mma put it under a cut lmao

1. Name your top three favorite songs.

o fuckUhhhHello Nurse - A Sound of ThunderUnwelcome - Arsis#3 kinda changes constantly, but right now it’s Vodka - Korpiklaani because that’s what I’m in the mood for at the moment lmao

2. Do you have a favorite band?

It’s currently Arsis but I dunnoooo, Inferi’s making it’s way up there lmao

3. What are you top five bands?

Arsis, Inferi, A Sound of Thunder, Eluveitie, and number 5 rotates too often to pin one down lmao usually either Alestorm, Korpiklaani, or Fleshgod Apocalypse though

4. Favorite album cover?

Arsis - Unwelcome

5. What’s an album that you prefer to listen straight through instead of shuffled?

Inferi - End of an EraEither that or Arsis’ Unwelcome just because it’s got a couple songs that fade into each other and I fucking LOVE when songs do that, but like the title still goes to Inferi just because I always skip I Share In Shame lmao

6. Do you listen to music for the instruments or the lyrics?

Instruments

7. What’s your favorite song to sing along to?

Either The Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle because it’s silly and fun, or some weird Raubtier stuff because it’s harder to tell I’m damn near tone-deaf when it comes to singing because I’m too busy butchering the Swedish phrases

OH ALSO Man the Pumps - Alestorm! I love the way the lyrics are written so it’s really fun to sing along to

… Also like 95% of Ye Banished Privateers music for the same reason lmao

What can I say I love singing the songs of the sea lmao

8. What’s your guilty pleasure band?

Aside from like, 90% of the Crypt of the Necrodancer soundtrack? Uh, just like, eurobeat in general lmao

9. Is there a song you love that you don’t think many people would like?

I mean I listen to like, hard death metal primarily, so like, all of it lmao

10. Is there a song that everybody loves that you don’t love?

Tbh I’m not a fan of that Leage of Legends Kpop thing lmaoLike don’t get me wrong the animation in the video is fucking fantastic but the song itself just isn’t my cup of tea¯\_(ツ)_/¯

11. What’s the oldest song you remember listening to?

Probably either The Offspring - Staring at the Sun or Rammstein - Du HastThey were both songs my dad really liked when I was a kid (and still does, as far as I know) and honestly some of my oldest memories are of him and I jamming out to them(Either that or like, everything on that one Great Big Sea cassette my grandmother had, that was my fucking jam when I was a kid)

12. What’s your favorite era of music?

This one, by virtue of that we can always listen to music from the past, but not the music in the future. Not yet, at leastThat and Inferi wasn’t around in the 80′s/90′s, so

13. Favorite instrument?

God, where to begin?Probably guitar, but I’m biased lmaoThat said, I absolutely love like, every instrument that existsLike bass is really fun to play, and saxophone is just fuckin rad all the timePiano’s also really fun to play, as well as an excellent tool for writing and such and justI dunno, instruments are cool lmao

14. Do you play any instruments?

Yeah, I play Piano, Guitar, Bass (not like, well, but), and I occasionally pretend I can do vocals lmao

15. Have you ever written a song?

MaybeI dunno maybe start a band with me and find out [Well What Is It Gesture]

16. Do you have a preference of male or female singers?

No preference

17. Do you listen more to sad or happy music?

Uhhh does angry count as sad?I kid but honestly just really happy hyped up folk metal is good shit lmao

18. What’s your go-to song when you want to pump yourself up?

That’s like, my entire music collection lmaoHowever Hello Nurse - A Sound of Thunder is probably one of my bestThough like, I’m lowkey embarassed of it since I’m not fond of the lyrics but it’s definitely one of those songs I’ll be dancin’ to like thirty seconds max in lmao

19. Favorite “long” song (more than 5 minutes)?

Man the Pumps - Alestorm??? I guess?? I’m not sure lmao I don’t really keep track

20. Favorite “short” song (less than 3 minutes)?

The Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle, Hands down.

21. What’s a song you don’t see yourself ever getting tired of?

Hello Nurse - A Sound of ThunderIt’s just really hype and I fucking LOVE the piano/guitar solo, it’s so good dude

22. When you’re sad, do you prefer to listen to sad music or happy music?

Sad, if I’m sad and listen to happy music, it’ll just make that music make me sad when I don’t want to be

23. Favorite female singer?

Nina Osegueda!

24. Do you listen to music when you do homework housework?

Yes

25. Are you able to read and listen to music at the same time?

Yeah

26. Do you listen to music to fall asleep?

No90% of the time I get too into it and I can’t sleep as a result lmao

27. If you listen to music to fall asleep, what do you listen to?

My uh, my usual Calm-Down Playlist For Getting Over Panic Attacks contains a lot of Wintersun, Blind Guardian, and that one Lost Horizon song so like, if I did it’d probably be that lmao

28. What music platform do you listen to music on the most?

Youtube

29. How often do you listen to music?

Daily? Would be like, constantly if I had headphones I wasn’t afraid of breaking lmao

30. What’s a song you used to love but now cannot stand to listen to?

Literally everything I used to listen to in 8th grade

31. Is there a song that’s too emotional for you to listen to?

Breathe - MoonspellThough like, that may have something to do with me being in the middle of a massive depressive episode when I first discovered it lmao

Either that or the aforementioned Song I Will Never Name

32. Do you have a shared favorite song with a best friend or partner?

Not that I know of?

33. Do you listen to records? CDs? Or just streaming?

Mostly streaming since I’m fucking poor, but like, I try to buy the CD’s of my favourite albums, or ones that I really want lmao

34. How many songs do you know all the lyrics to?

A bunch? I dunno like half the songs I know the lyrics to I completely forgot I know the lyrics to until it starts playing and I sing along lmao

35. Do you like to sing along to the music you listen to?

I’m doing so currently, but like, in general? NoAt least not when there’s anyone else around lmao

36. What was your childhood song?

Aside from like, That Which Will Not Be Named (meaning like, there’s a song that I will never tell anyone the name of, not an actual song with that as its title) Probably Staring at the Sun - OffspringOr like, a lot of Offspring songs lmao, I don’t remember most of their titles, it’s been a while

37. What was your childhood band/artist?

Kinda depends? Like really young childhood, Great Big Sea, but for the little-older-than-that childhood, Probably OffspringI’m not gonna mention the time in-between those since that point was The Band That Produced The Song I Shall Not NameOr like, from The Point In Childhood Where Everything Went Wrong With My Life And It Was Completely My Own Stupid Fault, like Skrillex or something, but let’s all, myself included, collectively forget about that ok

38. What’s a song that has inspired you?

hhhhh

I mean it was Deicide - Homage for Satan that initially inspired me to start learning more like, soloing techniques? Since like, the solo for that song damn near made me transcend reality. Shame the rest of the song isn’t very good though lmao

39. What is your favorite song lyric?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

40. Do you listen to classical music?

Yeah

41. If you listen to classical music, who is your favorite composer?

Uhhhh prolly Edvard Grieg I guess

42. Do you listen to jazz?

On occasion

43. What’s a song that reminds you of your best friend or partner?

The Vision Bleak - Demon of the MireSince like, it was my partner who introduced me to it lmao

44. What’s a song that reminds you of your parents?

Literally anything by Sublime will remind me a little of my dad, and literally anything by Tori Amos will remind me of my mum lmao

45. What was your favorite concert?

Bold of you to assume I can remember the only one I’ve ever been to

46. What’s a band you have always wanted to see perform?

fuck

All of them

I dunno probably Rammstein, I’ve heard their live shows are pretty insane but I’m also like, not the least flammable person on earth so y’know that’s a maybe lmao

47. How many concerts have you been to?

1.5? I remember I made it out to a Great Big Sea concert way back in like, elementary school, but I was too young to actually remember it lmao

Aside from that I got to see some dude named Andrew fucking SHRED a gig at a local place, I don’t think that counts but Andrew, dude, if you’re out there, you fucking killed it

48. Do you like attending concerts?

Bold of you to assume I have the money for that

49. What’s your favorite setting for a concert?

¯\_( 😥 )_/¯

Thanks for the ask!

#Thanks!#asks #anon

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how2to18 · 6 years

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GLOSS HIS NOVELS from Amazon blurbs and you might call Grady Hendrix a gimmick writer. He typically pairs a funny topic with a horror veneer (Ikea + evil prison warden ghost: Horrorstör, 1980s teen flick + possession: My Best Friend’s Exorcism), and his books often include a range of engaging paratexts (a mock Ikea catalog, a faux high school yearbook). But calling Hendrix a gimmick writer does a huge disservice to one of contemporary fiction’s most sensitive observers of the horrors that arise around — and sometimes because of — our efforts to grow closer with other humans. Through all the horror and tumult, in the humor and the nostalgia animating the psychological growth of his focal characters, Hendrix brings an encyclopedic awareness of the ways capital weighs down the labor force, crushing blue-collar workers in their daily efforts to keep ahead of the poverty line day after day.

Hendrix’s newest novel, We Sold Our Souls, won’t do much to rescue him from the gimmick writer gloss, but it puts the truth to the Wall Street Journal’s description of the writer as a “national treasure” in their review of his previous novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism. We Sold Our Souls explores heavy metal, its fantasy allegories, and the horrors those allegories reveal. It explores the experience of the economically oppressed — the crappy jobs folks work just so they can work another day, the dreams forgotten (because who has time for dreams between shifts?), the desire to make art that bares the raw emotion and pain of poverty and the anger with a world that seems not to care. It addresses the inauthenticity and carefully crafted emotional landscape of “sellout” artists, and the underbelly of a violent America. It’s about Black Iron Mountain and soul-sucking corpse beasties. It’s rad.

We Sold Our Souls tells the story of Kris Pulaski in the wake of touring with her 1990s heavy metal band Dürt Würk (after “dirt worker,” a nickname for graveyard diggers), starting 20 years after her best friend, band co-founder, and lead singer Terry Hunter stiffed her, Scottie Rocket (rhythm guitar), Bill (drums), and Tuck (bass) with contracts that gave Terry sole rights to the band’s discography. That contract transformed him into the Blind King, headliner of nu metal supergroup Koffin (think KISS meets Slipknot meets Linkin Park), now the world’s most famous band. Working a night clerk shift at a Best Western in one dying Rust Belt town at a time, ostracized from her former bandmates because of her actions on the poorly remembered “contract night” all those years ago, Kris lives the life of a nobody. But seeing billboards for Koffin’s farewell tour lights a fire under Kris to seek out what she and the band deserve.

What follows is a cross-country adventure through conspiracy theories, metalheads, and intense scenes of visceral horror, as Kris sets out to figure out what really happened on contract night. In the first third of the novel, she meets up with her former band members, a reunion that ultimately ends in Scottie Rocket’s suicide and the murder of his family by UPS deliverymen assassins. Kris falls into the arms of Tuck, who schemes with Bill to imprison her in an elite, cult-like rehab facility named the Well. The Well is built atop the bones of the Witch House, a derelict rental in the Kentucky wilderness where Dürt Würk used to record, and which also served as the long-ago site of contract night.

The middle third depicts Kris’s escape from the Well. Overcoming mind-numbing drugs, Kris beats up her captors with her guitar and discovers creepy monsters slurping out the souls of the rehab inmates, eventually remembering that the same beasts carried out this vile procedure on her and Dürt Würk all those years ago. She descends into the eponymous Well, crawling her way through pipes and caves and guano and bugs and darkness to escape rehab.

In the final third, we see Kris down and out in small-town America; she’s missed Koffin’s farewell tour, but the tour proved so successful that Koffin is hosting Hellstock ’19, a 50th-anniversary celebration of Woodstock staged with heavy metal bands. Kris believes Terry is using Hellstock to sell more souls, the same way he sold Dürt Würk’s souls on contract night. More cross-country hijinks ensue, including a mob of Koffin fans violently tearing apart Kris’s friend JD at a rest stop. In the end, Kris reunites with Terry onstage and together with Tuck they play Dürt Würk’s final album, Troglodyte. No concert-goer souls are sold, the performance and the album save the world, and Kris rises to become a heavy metal legend.

We Sold Our Souls provides a convoluted but intelligible journey through the back-and-forth of life in poor America, Kris going where she must to do what she can to survive and try to stop Terry. Troglodyte serves as the heart of the story and its critique of capitalism. Like many death metal albums of the genre’s heyday, a fantasy story forms the underlying narrative: the tale of hero Troglodyte who rises up to throw off the chains of Black Iron Mountain’s oppression. Kris, Scottie Rocket, and JD believe Troglodyte tells the story of the world, forming the blueprint for Kris’s quest to defeat Terry and the soul-sucking monsters. Hendrix describes the album track-for-track throughout Kris’s journey, detailing the sounds, the guitar runs, the drum beats, the vocals. For Kris, the lyrics become a mantra and battle cry; in the course of her journey, they lead the way, as she and JD perform close readings of the lyrics that would leave any English professor giddy.

Between chapters, Hendrix provides paratexts — snippets of interviews with Dürt Würk, radio transcripts of discussions about Troglodyte — that drive home the album’s legendary status in the heavy metal scene. After contract night, Terry destroyed all but a few copies that circulated among bootleggers. Troglodyte told the truth about the soul-suckers and Black Iron Mountain, the force to which all successful musicians and sellouts owe their millions. Kris brings the legend of Troglodyte to half-a-million metal fans. The lyrics are bad and the sound isn’t great, but the music is profound; it’s authentic, and bares truth as critique.

The novel and its fascination with heavy metal and the mythology of Troglodyte poke subtle fun at the heavy metal genre and its self-seriousness, but also embrace that seriousness as a platform for critique. As with most horror novels, the monsters and moments of fear and revulsion in We Sold Our Souls are both affective, provoking emotional responses, and also deeply allegorical. Hendrix’s corpse-like soul-suckers, who gain access to souls through the fine-print stipulations in contracts, force black bile out of their unconscious victims and slowly lap it away with hideous tongues. They are creepy, the bread and butter of horror. The pages-long description of Kris’s escape from the Well is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever read and shares much in common with a similar scene from his earlier novel Horrorstör. Hendrix knows his audience; being trapped, knowing death is coming and we can do nothing to stop it, creates more visceral terror than any monster, and he writes the terror expertly. The entrapment Kris feels, Black Iron Mountain literally pressing her down with no space to move, her body breaking and her lungs collapsing — this too is allegory, for capitalism, for bills, for living paycheck-to-paycheck, knowing the next paycheck might not come.

Hendrix’s exploration of capitalism as horror in We Sold Our Souls restores to sight all that we are blind to, all that we blind ourselves to (sometimes purposefully, to make it all bearable), as we sell our souls, not to some Christian devil but to Black Iron Mountain, that specter of capital that takes, takes, takes. Hendrix’s description of Kris busking, purged of hope and lost in middle America after her escape from the Well, captures this deftly:

Every song was the same song. These were songs for people who were scared to open their mailboxes, whose phones calls never brought good news. These were songs for people standing at the crossroads waiting for the bus. People who bounced between debt collectors and dollar stores, collection agencies and housing offices, family court and emergency rooms, waiting for a check that never came, waiting for a court date, waiting for a call back, waiting for a break, crushed beneath the wheel.

The songs she plays are not the same — they range from heavy metal (Black Sabbath, Zeppelin) to the blues (Lead Belly) to protest anthems (Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie) — but they share a purpose summarized in the album at the center of We Sold Our Souls. The mythology of Dürt Würk’s Troglodyte rears its head again and again in similar passages that capture in eerie encyclopedic detail, so painfully familiar to those of us who are/were those people, the life of economic hardship in the United States.

Kris, her nameless busking partner, the dead homeless woman in the graveyard, the half million swarming at Hellstock ’19: we are all Troglodyte waiting for Poincare’s butterfly to remind us that this is not all there is. We have to crawl out, escape Black Iron Mountain, and open the door with the cerulean hue. Grady Hendrix reminds us in We Sold Our Souls that there’s a way and a hope. Metal never dies.

Sean Guynes-Vishniac is a PhD student in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

The post We’re All Dürt Würkers: Grady Hendrix’s Heavy Metal Horror appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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Sean Guynes-Vishniac is a PhD student in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

The post We’re All Dürt Würkers: Grady Hendrix’s Heavy Metal Horror appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2shkMja

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

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kboytube · 7 years

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Foo Fighters mainman Dave Grohl and drummer Taylor Hawkins revisit the band's first five albums

In 1994, Dave Grohl's world imploded. Having been one third of Nirvana – then one of the world's most significant cultural propositions – with Kurt Cobain's sudden death, the drummer found himself personally and professionally adrift. Months later, having survived the hurricane that ensued Cobain's death, Grohl dusted himself off and formed Foo Fighters. What began as a modest, almost cathartic exercise quickly spiralled into a monstrously successful group, and a string of hits – Learn To Fly, Everlong, Times Like These – soon followed. Grohl simply wanted to liberate songs he'd kept locked away while his life was consumed by drumming in what was then the world's most pivotal band. But Grohl has the Midas touch. Everything he handles turns to gold records, which line the walls of his studios and homes. With the band's first five records, they crafted a sound which made good on Nirvana's loud-quiet stylings while adding a raucous buoyancy to the recordings, and laid down a template that would carry through their now nine-album strong career. Here, Grohl and drummer Taylor Hawkins revisit the turbulent early history of Foo Fighters, one record at a time.

Foo Fighters – 1995

"After Nirvana, I wasn't really sure what to do," says Grohl, who was 25 when Kurt Cobain's suicide brought that group abruptly to an end. "I was asked to join a couple of other bands as the drummer, but I just couldn't imagine doing that because it would just remind me of being in Nirvana; every time I sat down at a drum set, I would think of that. And other people would think of that as well. I thought, what do I do? Do I even play music any more? I don't know. Maybe that was it. Maybe it's time to do something else. Maybe real life starts now. Because at that point I had been touring in bands since I was 18 and I'd seen the world and got to be in this huge band."As Grohl contemplated his next move, he was well aware that anything he did was going to be overshadowed by his association with Nirvana whose influence only grows with the passing years. "When I was young, someone played me the Klark Kent record that Stewart Copeland had done. I thought how cool that he could make a record and people can listen to it objectively because it wasn't Stewart Copeland from The Police, it was Klark Kent. That's kind of what I wanted to do. There were some songs I'd recorded in my friend's studio while Nirvana was still a band and an independent label in Detroit wanted to release something." It wasn't the first time Grohl's compositions had been the subject of outside interest. In 1991 he'd released a 10-track cassette called Late on the Washington-based Simple Machines label. Initially contractual restrictions prevented him from releasing any more new material, but with the demise of Nirvana in April 1994, multi-instrumentalist Grohl was free to pursue a solo career. He booked six days at Bob Lang's studio north of Seattle, used earlier that year by Nirvana, and set about recording the batch of songs he'd written over the past six years. "I was really prepared. I had demoed the songs and I knew what the arrangements were. I knew what I was going to do on the drums and I'd figured out all the guitar. That would be the most time I had ever spent in the studio recording stuff of my own. I just thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I never intended for it to be a major releases. I started my own company, Roswell Records, and I called it Foo Fighters because I wanted people to think it was a band. I didn't want any names on it or pictures."

Taking the name Foo Fighters from the term given to UFOs by World War II pilots, Grohl ran off a few cassette copies. When one reached the hands of a Seattle DJ friend, who played I'll Stick Around, "people kind of freaked on it". It was a reaction not unlike the one Grohl had when hearing his new songs in their full splendour. "I remember that was the first time I ever listened to something I'd done and thought: 'That sounds like a band. That's fucking rad.'" The reaction to the tape was swift. "I'd get calls from Virgin, RCA, MCA, Columbia or Capitol or whatever." In the end Grohl signed with Capitol after being courted by President Gary Gersh who, as an A&R man with Geffen, had signed Nirvana. Recording all the instruments in the studio was one thing, but even the talented Grohl couldn't play them all live. For that he would need a band. After securing bass player Nate Mendell and drummer William Goldsmith from the recently defunct Sunny Day Real Estate he gave a tape to guitarist Pat Smear, a man who had also played with Nirvana. "He said, 'God, this stuff is really poppy!'" squeals Grohl in his best Smear impersonation. "I'm like: 'Really?' He goes: 'I love it.' 'Wow, thanks. We're looking for a guitar player.' He's like: 'I'll do it.' I'm like: 'You will?' No shit, because he's like the coolest fucking guy in the world. That guy was in The Germs. He was great in Nirvana, and I thought he's way out of this league; this is just a stupid demo." With a band assembled they began rehearsing. But the role of frontman was a new and uncomfortable one for Grohl: "Standing up and singing a song with a guitar with shredding volume did not feel natural. It still doesn't." He also found the experience of performing his own material in distinct contrast to that of playing with Nirvana: "It's a different feeling when you're singing words you've written and playing songs you've written. It's so much more personal." When the Foo Fighters' self-titled debut album arrived on shelves in July 1995, its cover depicted the band's name above a photograph of a gun. Considering Grohl's former bandmate had shot himself to death only 15 months earlier, the choice of cover image might appear to some to be tactless. "Yeah, people kind of freaked out on that," admits Grohl, whose love of sci-fi had led him to choose the picture of the Buck Rogers toy gun. "You know, honestly, that never came to mind once. Obviously it didn't, because if I thought people would associate that with that, I would never have done it." The cover aside, reaction to the album was positive. It reached number 23 in the Billboard chart. The Foo Fighters had arrived.

The Colour And The Shape - 1997

It was almost as if Foo Fighters had evolved accidentally but now, as a fully fledged group with a hit record and tour behind them, it was clear the approach to the second album would be different. "Going into making The Colour And The Shape I knew it had to be good," says Grohl. "It couldn't be a basement demo. It couldn't be that second raw album that most people were doing at the time." Grohl, though, was still uncertain about exactly what it was he'd created. "The foundation of the band was that demo tape recorded by one person and at times it could feel flimsy. It would make you question: Are we a band? Or 'How does this work?' So we immediately started writing new songs like My Hero, Enough Space and My Poor Brain. We hired Gil Norton to produce. He'd produced some of our favourite records: Pixies and Echo & The Bunnymen, stuff like that. Gil is awesome in that he fucking wrings you out. He wants every last drop of performance and song. It was intense. I learnt more from that guy than anyone."

But by the time they'd nearly completed the album, it had become obvious all was not well. "We'd finished like 12 songs," recalls Grohl. "We'd recorded Monkey Wrench, Wind Up, Doll and My Poor Brain and everyone knew that it wasn't really happening. William, our drummer, wasn't really gelling. It didn't sound powerful. It just didn't sound how I'd imagined it to sound." The group took a Christmas break, during which Grohl went into a friend's studio and started recording new material, playing drums himself. He played the songs to Norton: "He's like: 'Those are good. I like those'. So I started recording newer songs, playing the drums, playing the guitar and William was bumming out. That turned into a breakdown and then I realised he wasn't coming back, so I recorded all the drums on the record myself. It was basically Pat, Nate and I for that album. We did it pretty quickly. We re-recorded the record in about four weeks. When we were done, I knew we had a fucking great album." In addition to the personal differences within the group, Grohl was also in the midst of domestic upheaval. "Oh, I was getting a divorce too," he adds nonchalantly. "You know what's funny? People come up to me – it's usually men – and say: 'Man, that album, it helped me through my divorce'. I'm like: 'Really? It caused mine.'" If contentment is artistic death, then at least Grohl's woes were having a positive influence on the music. "I was living out of my duffel bag on this cat piss-stained mattress in my friend's back room with 12 people in the house. It was fucking awful. Made for a good record though."

There Is Nothing Left To Lose – 1999

For two whole weeks Foo Fighters were a quartet again. Alanis Morissette's drummer Taylor Hawkins had joined the group but, three days before they were to head out on tour, "Pat said: 'Guys I have to quit',"recalls Grohl, the sense of shock still palpable. "I'm like, what the fuck? What next?" "That was a splintered fucking band at that point," Hawkins reflects of his first days with the group. "It really was," concurs Grohl. "The band was just holding on by our fingertips this whole time." Grohl convinced Smear to stay on until he found a replacement in his old friend Franz Stahl, guitarist with hardcore band Scream who Grohl had played with prior to Nirvana. After the tour, Grohl was finding the Los Angeles lifestyle too distracting. "We had the bachelor pad in Laurel Canyon. We would just go drag the Sunset Strip and bring it back to the house." Returning to the more tranquil pastures of his Virginia roots, he built a studio in the basement of his house. They extricated themselves from their record contract when Gersh left Capitol, and became a three-piece again. "It didn't work out with Franz," Grohl states succinctly. The Foos brought in producer Adam Kasper and set to work.

"It was so great," smiles Grohl. "We were in a basement in Virginia with sleeping bags nailed to the wall. There's no record company, there's no suits knocking on the door, there's no one telling you what's good or bad. It was four months of the most mellow recording." The relaxed conditions were reflected in the music which was softer than anything they'd produced to that point. "It's easy to fucking stomp on a distortion pedal and make a chorus blow up," explains Grohl. "That's easy. It's easy to turn up to 10 and scream your balls off. What's not easy is to write a song that's a mid-level linear dynamic that moves from beginning to end with melody. "So that was the idea with a lot of that record, whether it was Learn To Fly, Ain't It The Life, Gimme Stitches or Next Year. We were more focused on melody and songwriting, and it took a lot of people off guard. A lot of people thought Foo Fighters were selling out or going soft. It was more about getting into the music and writing. That album opened up doors for us to make anything possible."

One By One - 2002

"The making of that album was a fiasco," says Grohl bluntly. "We spent four months and nearly a million bucks recording that record and we threw it away. We just fucking scrapped the whole thing. It was not good enough." There were a number of factors which contributed to them dumping an album for the second time. One was Hawkins's increasing drug use, which culminated in him overdosing during a trip to London. "After that I started getting my shit together," says Hawkins. "I wanted to get over that hurdle and start working. I think we all wanted to start working, but in hindsight we jumped into it a little quick." "That's exactly what happened," agrees Grohl. When the band – which now included ex-No Use For A Name guitarist Chris Shiflett – did get to work, it was with the express desire to adopt a more meticulous approach than they'd used on the previous album. "For One By One I thought: Okay we've got to make this sound fucking perfect," says Grohl. "So we went in, and ultimately what happened was we sucked a lot of the life out of the songs. It wasn't inspired. I'd listen back to rough mixes and think this sounds like another band playing our songs. I remember looking at the calendar of the promo tour and imagining having to do interviews for an album that I wasn't 100 per cent convinced of. I thought: 'I can't do that. I cannot go out and lie. I just can't fucking do it.

In addition to his day job with Foo Fighters, Grohl had been moonlighting with Queens Of The Stone Age, playing drums on their Songs For Their Deaf album. Given the choice of touring with Queens or promoting an inferior Foo's album, he made a tough decision. "I just thought: 'No that can't come out. It's not good enough. We need to take a break. I'm going to go do this thing which is inspiring me'. It felt great, but within three months, I started missing the guys and the music. So I came back and we thought we'd just go back into the basement with Nick [Raskulinecz] and start demoing." "Dave came to my house one day and we did a couple of demos," says Hawkins. "One of the songs he had written was Times Like These, which was kind of about the band breaking up and remembering why we're doing it and all that stuff. Then we did Low. It felt good. So we're like, let's just go back to your pad in DC and record those tunes." Starting at 11 o'clock one night, Dave and Taylor rattled off three songs. For Grohl, the magic had returned. "That feeling was back. You could hear it. And that's what was missing from the first time. It was like: 'Holy shit, are we making a record right now?'" They were. And two weeks later, after Nate and Chris had added their parts, they had.

In Your Honor – 2005

The tour for One By One had elevated Foo Fighters to a new level. "We had finally established ourselves to the point where I thought we can play an hour-and-a-half set and make 50,000 people sing all the words. That's fucking cool." As proud as Grohl was, it also served to make him question the band's next move. "We toured so much for the last record and it was such a fucking blast, but it was gruelling. I was 36 and I'd been doing it for 18 years and I thought: 'Is this what I'm supposed to do with the rest of my life? I don't know. Maybe it's time to have the band take another left turn.'" Inspired by Tom Petty's solo work on She's The One, Grohl considered doing a soundtrack. "So I started demoing all this acoustic music with that in mind. After an hour or two of listening to it, I thought, why can't this be a Foo Fighters record? Maybe we should do this kick-ass mellow acoustic record. So I thought maybe that's what we should do. And then I thought no, I have to have loud rock music in my life somewhere." Faced with reconciling an acoustic album with Grohl's need to have "loud rock" in his life, the Foos frontman came up with a solution. "Why not make two CDs?" he thought. Why not indeed? Nine years and four albums had given Grohl the confidence and licence to do whatever he wanted. "I eventually want it to get to the point where when people ask me what kind of band I'm in, I say: 'I just play music'. It's not one specific genre of music, it's not one specific style. I'm just a musician. I can play all these different instruments, I can write a bossa nova, I can write a thrash tune. It's such an incredible freedom. That was the point of this album." Nine months in creation, In Your Honor was an assured work of musical chiaroscuro and one of which Grohl was duly proud. "It's exactly what I imagined it to be and it sounds better than I hoped. It's my shining achievement of my life," he said at the time of its release. It would have been easy for Grohl to rest on his Nirvana laurels. He could have dined out musically on that connection forever, but he chose to look ahead at Foo Fighters, who offered him a future. It's why he got the band's initials branded on the back of his neck: In Your Honor solidified that feeling. "It's the first time I'd ever imagined 10 more years of being in this band." As he reflects on the turbulent and triumphant career of Foo Fighters' earliest days, the humble Grohl allows himself a rare moment of pride. "Going from the demo tape that took six days to record to what it became, it was like having your child grow up to be the head of the U.N. Unbelievable."

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-- Публикувано от Blogger за Metal Head на 3/23/2018 09:00:00 пр.об.

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