Dave Grohl Details New Foo Fighters Album, HBO Series
Season four of Game of Thrones may be inching toward its finale, but HBO has another kickass project on the horizon courtesy of Dave Grohl. The Foo Fighters frontman recently revealed that his travelogue docuseries on HBO would be titled Sonic Highways, and in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Grohl goes further in-depth about the show’s ambitious premise. Additionally, the Foo Fighters formally announced that their new, still-untitled LP will arrive in November 2014.
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The series follows the Foos as they traveled to famous recording studios across the U.S. as they record their new album. Each city also comes with its own musical history, which Grohl said inspires the feel of the track recorded there. “So once the music and the theme of each city was set, we traveled to each place and spent a week there,” Grohl tells THR. “We’d get there, start recording and I would just run around town filming and interviewing as many people as I can. I did over 100 interviews. At the end of the week, I’d take all of my transcripts, put them on the floor, sit there with a pen and my journal and I reduce all of these stories into a song. I take from peoples’ backgrounds, anecdotes, the environment — it’s like reporting. It’s musical bungee jumping.”
In addition to previously announced collaborators like Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen, Gary Clark Jr. and Joe Walsh, Grohl also reveals that he shared studio time with Carrie Underwood, Chuck D and Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes. “You’ll recognize Foo Fighters in this record but you’ll also be surprised by us. We’re doing things that we’ve never done before,” Grohl said. “And I want to say that it’s only eight songs but I think it might be our longest record because, as I was writing these songs, I had to take a cinematic approach. Like I couldn’t just write a three-and-a-half-minute long KROQ jingle and film it for the finale of an episode about the history of music in New Orleans, ya know?” In a press release, the Foo Fighters also announced the eight cities they visited while recording their new album: Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Nashville, New York, Seattle, and Washington D.C., where Grohl started his musical journey as the drummer in a hardcore band called Scream.
In the Q&A, Grohl also discussed one of the more poignant moments from this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony: His hug with Courtney Love, whom he’d been at odds with throughout the decades following Kurt Cobain’s death. “I saw Courtney walking past [earlier in the night], and I just tapped her on the shoulder and we looked at each other in the eyes and that was it — we’re just family,” Grohl told THR. “We’ve had a rocky road. We’ve had a bumpy past, but at the end of the day we’re a big family and when we hugged each other it was a real hug.”