(Credits: Far Out / Raphael Pour-Hashemi)
Mon 9 March 2026 20:30, UK
Not every song Dave Grohl ever wrote was supposed to be nice and tender all the way through.
This was Foo Fighters we’re talking about, and while some of their greatest tunes have those singalong choruses that sound perfect in a stadium, no one in their right mind was going to look their friends in the face and say that they wanted ‘White Limo’ played at their wedding or anything. Grohl’s taste was often a lot heavier, but sometimes it takes that one beautiful melody to lodge its way into people’s hearts.
After all, Grohl had already grown up listening to some of the best pop music ever created, way before he had heard of punk rock. The greatest bands in his household were always acts like The Beatles, and even if Rush was a little bit heavier than what most kids were listening to, it was a lot easier to pick out individual hooks in a song like ‘Freewill’ or ‘Tom Sawyer’ in between the relentless drum clinic that Neil Peart was putting on behind the kit every single time they played.
But Grohl’s first passion was always playing in punk bands. All you needed to know was a couple of chords and have the passion for it, and when he started working with Scream, they weren’t going to be hitting the top 40 by any stretch. This was the same kind of hardcore punk band that Bad Brains and Fugazi helped to create, and Grohl was ready to put in every single ounce of energy into demolishing his kit at the end of every night.
When he started working in Nirvana, though, there was already a much different approach to music. Kurt Cobain wanted his tunes to sound almost as simple as possible, and Grohl remembered using the analogy of children’s songs when it came to making songs with minimal drum fills. They wanted to give the audience something they’d remember, but when the Foos started making their own classics, the rock landscape had shifted a lot in just a few years.
The biggest names now were bands like Green Day and Weezer, and while there was still room to be a kickass rock and roll group, there were also bands that were delving into adult contemporary every now and again. Being mellow wasn’t a bad word anymore, but there was something different going on with the band The Gandharvas when Grohl first heard them in passing during the 1990s.
You can certainly here the more atmospheric band that they wanted to be under some of thor production, but Grohl felt that their song ‘Watching the Girl’ was pure beauty when he first heard it, saying, “There’s a Canadian band called the Gundharvas, a song called ‘Watching The Girl’, its one of the prettiest songs I’ve ever heard in my life, it’s a great melody. The greatest duet since ‘Leather And Lace’.”
While the band is certainly one of the more obscure gems to come out of the 1990s, this might have been a case where they came together at the wrong time. Their genre of music didn’t really have a set scene tied to it, and while there are many pieces of the song that work well, it almost feels more at home in that strange era at the start of the 1990s, when no one knew where the music world was going to be going next before grunge.
Still, you can’t fault a band for making a song that’s as infectious as this, and while a cosign from Grohl certainly helped, it didn’t manage to give them the best exposure they could have hoped for. Then again, if anyone’s looking for some decent pop from the 1990s that isn’t smothered in the sheen of Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray, you could certainly do a lot worse than this.