Dave Grohl Confirms New Foo Fighters Album, Details HBO Doc Series
One day after Dave Grohl biographer Paul Brannigan revealed plans for the Foo Fighters frontman to host and produce his own HBO show, Grohl himself has detailed the as-yet-untitled series.
Foo Fighters’ New Album ‘Halfway Done,’ Says Butch Vig
Grohl will direct the series in addition to hosting and will visit legendary recording studios in eight cities: Chicago, Austin, Nashville, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and New York. The series will coincide with both Foo Fighters’ 20th anniversary and a new album, which Grohl confirmed will be out this fall.
The musician recorded one song in each city, with local iconic musicians including Kiss’ Paul Stanley, Heart’s Nancy Wilson, the Eagles’ Joe Walsh and Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye. As Grohl noted in a press release, the singer saved writing lyrics to each song until the last day of recording “in order to be inspired by the experiences, interviews and personalities that became part of the process.” Grohl said the new series, set to premiere this fall, will be a “love letter to the history of American music,” with each episode looking at the identity of its respective city.
The full list of studios has yet to be revealed, but Brannigan noted that Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio, Don Zientara’s Inner Ear studios in Washington, D.C. and Rancho De La Luna — the California studio frequented by Queens Of The Stone Age and Arctic Monkeys — will all appear.
The show builds and expands on on Sound City, the 2013 documentary directed and produced by Grohl that focused on the famed Los Angeles recording studio of the same name.
As for the new album, producer Butch Vig gave a status report last month, noting, “We’ve been recording at some different locations, but we’re almost halfway done with the recording and it’s going well. It sounds different — we’ve thrown a few things into the mix, in the recording process, that are going to give the record a different sound and a different feel. It’s been a challenge, but it’s also been exciting.”
The producer’s assessment was in line with Grohl’s own description of the album, which he described to Rolling Stone last year as “badass. We’re doing something that nobody knows about, it’s fucking rad. We begin recording soon, but we’re doing it in a way that no one’s done before and we’re writing the album in a way that I don’t think has been done before.”