(Credits: Far Out / Dave Grohl)
Fri 8 August 2025 7:00, UK
The music industry doesn’t always revolve around the typical album cycle for artists. Everyone has their contractual obligations, and it’s easy to play the industry game by throwing in a couple of token songs for a greatest hits album now and again. But Dave Grohl knew when some of his obligation tunes were a massive mistake.
It’s hard to really gauge how much passion bands have when making that style of tune, but Grohl can only be honest when it comes to projects that he doesn’t enjoy. He said numerous times that he was far from enthusiastic when making the song ‘Wheels’, and while One by One eventually morphed into a great album, it’s not like Grohl wanted to revisit the times when the band were dangerously close to calling it a day after one too many fights between him and Taylor Hawkins.
But throughout the late 1990s, it was a never-ending cycle of finding out who was in the band from week to week. Grohl never had time to settle his differences with band members in private, so when he lost William Goldsmith, Pat Smear, and Franz Stahl in rapid succession over the course of a few years, fans had to be wondering if he was a little in over his head or simply demanded too much out of his players. Even if he had some shakeups now and again, the music never suffered.
Even when they were throwing songs away for a movie, they were always well above average compared to everything else. ‘The One’ may have been one of Hawkins’ least favourite Foos songs, but it does its job as a silly romp on the Orange County soundtrack. But as soon as Grohl saw the 1998 version of Godzilla, he would have gladly taken back his song if he could have.
Whereas most people would be vain enough to complain when their song wasn’t used in the movie, ‘A320’ works perfectly fine as a Foo Fighters obscurity that’s well worth everyone’s time. As soon as the frontman got a load of the godawful effects and terrible storyline of the movie, though, it practically made him want to duck out of the theatre.
Most people would at least be proud to have their song in an action movie, but Grohl could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the song never made it into the film, saying, “We saw the movie and we were like, ‘Oh, my god.’ We sat through that whole, boring fucking movie, waiting to hear our music, and then we’re like, ‘Fuck, they didn’t even play our song.’ But then we thought, ‘You know what? That movie sucked so bad that I am glad they didn’t fucking play our song in it.’ They gave us a lot of money. But it was a cool song.”
In fact, most of the Godzilla soundtrack is a lot better than a movie that scattershot really deserved. That tended to happen a lot in the late 1990s and early 2000s where the soundtrack would be oddly better than the movie, with Green Day and Rage Against the Machine showing up with the Foos on Godzilla and even Mission Impossible 2 featuring great performances by Metallica, managing to get a genuinely great song out of Limp Bizkit.
But even if Grohl’s song was used in the movie, it’s not like doing so would automatically make it good by any stretch. It was simply an excuse for them to make a new song, but it does give an interesting snapshot of the zany period where Grohl was beginning to finalise the band’s lineup.
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