Dave Grohl Opens Up About Making the Foo Fighters‘ New Album in Seven Days, His Life After Nirvana, and Why Rock Isn‘t Dead
The rock icon sits down with the Broken Record podcast for one of his most candid conversations in years
Dave Grohl has never been short on stories. Sitting down with Broken Record host Justin Richmond at the Foo Fighters’ own studio—a sprawling room lined with memorabilia, where a copy of Led Zeppelin II hangs at the end of a long hallway—the rock icon covered nearly four decades of music history in a single wide-ranging conversation. The occasion was the release of Your Favorite Toy, the band’s twelfth studio album. What followed was something rarer: a genuinely unguarded look at how Dave Grohl became Dave Grohl.
From Pots and Pans to Nevermind
Grohl traces his origin story back to a laundry room in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where his childhood friend and engineer Barrett Jones ran a four-track studio. “I realized like, oh, if there’s eight tracks, I could lay down a drum track and then put a bass over it, and then put some guitars over it, and then put a vocal on it, and it’ll sound like a band even though it’s just one person,” Grohl recalled. Before that, he’d been bouncing cassette tapes between boom boxes—drums on pots and pans, guitar layered on top—teaching himself multitracking before he had a word for it.
That scrappy ethos carried straight into the Nevermind sessions, which Grohl says were recorded live with barely more gear than those early basement experiments. “There’s maybe three pictures” from the entire recording, he noted—including one of the minimalist drum setup that produced some of the most iconic sounds of the ’90s. “The reason why it worked is because when we recorded live, those songs, we just counted in and we’d do it.”
The Scream Education—and the Drum Lesson From a Bass Player
Before Nirvana, Grohl was the teenage drummer for the D.C. hardcore band Scream, and he credits bassist Skeeter Thompson with fundamentally reshaping how he played. “Before I joined Scream, I was like a wild horse,” he said. “I was reckless.” Thompson sat him down, lit a joint, and told him they were going to play one riff for half an hour—no drum fills. Grohl lasted about thirty seconds. “He looked at me and kind of winked, like, ‘no, you can’t do that,'” Grohl said. “He broke me like a horse and it really worked. It was my one valuable drum lesson and it was from a bass player.”
Seven Days to a New Album
Your Favorite Toy came together the way Grohl apparently does his best work: fast, instinctive, and slightly chaotic. He described lying in bed at 5 a.m. scrolling through a library of roughly 50 instrumental demos when 10 songs suddenly sequenced themselves perfectly in a row. “I literally texted everybody at five o’clock in the morning and I was like, okay, I think this is what we should do. Let’s start tomorrow at ten o’clock in the morning.” The album was tracked in about seven days, with the band recording one person at a time in his house because the room was simply too small to fit everyone at once—a callback, as Grohl pointed out, to the tiny Discord Records basement studio in Arlington where so many of his favorite D.C. records were made.
Hot Takes: Ian MacKaye Loves Ted Nugent and Pat Smear’s Favorite Artist Is Mariah Carey
Some of the episode’s most entertaining moments came in its diversions. Grohl revealed that he got Minor Threat co-founder and punk legend Ian MacKaye a Ted Nugent Cameo video for his birthday—prompting MacKaye, who apparently had no idea what Cameo was, to be completely baffled and delighted. Grohl also later sent a fake donation message to Fugazi‘s newly released Albini sessions on Bandcamp, signing it as Nugent. “It took about three weeks, and I just got the text the other day,” Grohl said. “He’s like, ‘Hey Nuge, thanks for the donation.'”
Then there’s Pat Smear. Asked about his bandmate’s musical taste, Grohl paused for effect before delivering: “Mariah Carey. Number one.” He added that Smear—guitarist of the Germs and a punk O.G. who saw the Sex Pistols at Winterland—is a devoted Mariah fan, and encouraged Richmond to do an entire deep-dive episode on the subject.
“I Can’t Believe I’m Still Doing This”
At 57, Grohl shows no signs of slowing down, and he pushed back on the idea that longevity in rock requires pacing yourself. He pointed to McCartney, Jagger, and Joe Walsh as models—artists who don’t decelerate, they accelerate. “I feel really grateful that we’re here,” he said. “Because it could just as easily be I’ve done it, I’m jaded—it could go that direction. It just doesn’t.”
After Nirvana ended, Grohl admitted there was a period when music itself felt painful—sitting behind a drum kit made him sad, listening to records made him sad. He wrote his way out. “That part of it is, you sort of write your way through life,” he said. Foo Fighters was the result, built almost entirely by Grohl alone on that debut record, and still going more than 30 years later. “That’s the thing that always saved my life. I have to do it.”
The full episode of Broken Record with Dave Grohl is available now on all podcast platforms. The Foo Fighters’ new album Your Favorite Toy is out now.