(Credits: Andreas Lawen, Fotandi)
Sat 24 January 2026 15:00, UK
The fact that Dave Grohl could move past Nirvana with Foo Fighters is practically a miracle.
Any other musician would have never wanted to pick up an instrument ever again once they lost someone as important as Kurt Cobain, and yet Grohl is probably counting his blessings every single day for being able to play to stadiums all around the world. But since they were famous right out of the gate, there were bound to be a few moments that Grohl wasn’t especially proud of behind the scenes.
Before they had even made a proper album, Grohl was already going through the growing pains that every other band spends their first few years going through. William Goldsmith was a great drummer, but since he wasn’t what Grohl was looking for, going through both him and Franz Stahl within the span of a few years was bound to be stressful when it came time to make a new record. But after the dust settled, Grohl knew the best way to get away from it all was to come back home.
Making a record in his house probably wasn’t going to be the coolest decision circa 1999, but listening to There is Nothing Left to Lose is like a ray of sunshine through all of those dark times. Not every tune is necessarily the cheeriest of all time, but whether it’s on the heavy riffs of ‘Stacked Actors’ or the echo-laden guitar riffs on ‘Aurora’, you can tell that Grohl is finally settling into his role as a songwriter.
Then again, the whole record is a lot lighter than the average hard rock fan would have wanted. The band sounds great when working as a trio, but when taking the deep dive, there are a lot more songs that follow the lead of tunes like ‘Learn to Fly’ than you might think. That song was far from the worst tune in the world, but if Grohl wasn’t a fan of his pop-radio smash, he was going to have even more disdain for what turned up on ‘Next Year’.
Granted, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, either. In fact, it’s actually better than ‘Learn to Fly’ in many respects. The guitar riff might be incredibly simple, but the open chords combined with those gorgeous harmonies make it sound somewhere between Eagles and something that would have turned up on The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. But for someone who never liked Eagles, Grohl did have his fair share of problems with the tune.
The song might not have been the biggest hit of his career, but he would have been glad to throw the whole thing out if he had the chance, saying, “Usually the other songs are just introspective, emotional love songs. ‘Next Year’ is a piece of shit! That song is so stupid! It’s weird. I look back on a lot of the songs and some of them are jewels on their own and others are just hiccups or skips.”
A bit predictable coming from someone who claimed to love bands like Slayer and Celtic Frost, but we can’t ignore just how good Grohl is at this kind of songwriting. It’s not the most energetic thing in the world, but when you look at a song like ‘Ain’t It the Life’, Grohl could have fit quite nicely with the AM radio gold of the 1970s if he had wanted to, which probably explains why they made a rock and roll version of Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’ later down the line.
And looking at where Grohl would go only a few albums later, In Your Honor could have never been made had ‘Next Year’ not come first. He may not have known it at the time, but he was woodshedding what his songs could be, and the next few years showed him that there was a lot more to life than loud guitars.
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