Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters posted this video a couple of weeks ago. In it, he gives us a glimpse into his creative process, and talks about writing ‘Everlong,’ one of my favorite songs that he has done.
Here is the video
There are some cool takeaways from the video. I’ll run through a few of them here.
Use your downtime. Grohl was literally in a recording studio, working on a different project and a different set of songs. But he found himself “between takes,” and a bit bored. So he started playing around, found a chord progression that grabbed him emotionally, and built on that.
Know Yr Idols. Grohl thought the chord progression was cool in part because “it sounded like Sonic Youth,” a band that he loved. This is actually a long-standing creative technique: You try to copy something you like, and you fail, and the failure is interesting.
Now, in Grohl’s case, he actually got to play his interesting failure to sound exactly like Sonic Youth for a couple of the members of Sonic Youth. You might not have that direct a channel of feedback in your creative process, but still.
Revisit, and Re-do. The way he tells it, Grohl got a decent-sounding demo. So decent, in fact, that the folks from Sonic Youth thought he should just release that version. But Grohl went back and re-recorded it, to bring out more of the rock feel he heard in the song.
Then, years later, when Howard Stern asked him to play it stripped down, Grohl re-imagined the song yet again, and re-connected with the emotional core of why he wrote it.
Some of my favorite artists do this. I recall David Bowie did a number of versions of “All the Young Dudes” through the years, in a wide variety of styles. Similarly, Joe Jackson has re-interpreted “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” again and again in concert, allowing his most-famous hit to stay fresh for him and for his listeners. Grohl is keeping up a fine tradition of self-reinterpretation.
Deconstruct Your Instrument. I think my favorite part of the video is when Grohl says “I don’t know how to play the guitar, so I actually think of the guitar like a drumset,” with the low notes being the kick and snare, and the higher strings playing the part of cymbals.
I think I like this so much because, back when I was performing, I used to joke that I treated the guitar as a percussive instrument. So when I heard Grohl talk about his approach, it really resonated with me. It brought to mind an interview with Bob Mould I read, probably thirty years ago. Mould said his songwriting really began to get interesting to him once he started trying to play chords backwards, and upside-down.
Long story short, don’t be afraid to get back to what the Zen masters call “beginner’s mind,” where your instrument presents itself to you like an alien object. In short, never be afraid of the moment when you say, I don’t know what I’m doing, but it sounded cool.
Hello, everyone. As you may have noticed, I stepped away from writing for a while there. I apologize for the delay. I got caught up in writing some grant proposals, over the winter, and that process ended up draining my batteries more than I knew. But my tanks are filling again, and I hope to be back to regular writing for The Late World again as we move into the spring. Thank you for hanging in there with me. I appreciate it more than you know. -Dd.