Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Tue 6 October 2026 16:00, UK
Dave Grohl didn’t spend his nights thinking about how to make hits in Foo Fighters.
The concept of him actually being the lead singer and frontman of a band might have been a goof when he first made the cassette that became their first record, but when you look through so many of the other records that he made, it’s not like he didn’t find the right formula to create the catchiest tunes possible. Then again, sometimes the term ‘catchy’ didn’t always have to be something that could get on the radio whenever he made a new record.
After all, Kurt Cobain was one of his first major songwriting teachers, and it’s not like the Nirvana frontman wrote tunes specifically for people to dance to. A lot of Nirvana’s records were a lot more biting than before, and while they did have a lot of great moments throughout their career, it’s not like everyone was going to make a song like ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ into the massive single that the title would have implied.
It was all about playing music that you could feel in your gut whenever you played, and Grohl knew that better than anyone. He needed to put his entire body into every song that he worked on in Nirvana, but he also knew that The Beatles were always going to have a special place in his heart for what they did. Their music was some of the finest pop music ever made, but pop always went hand-in-hand with some of the heaviest genres imaginable whenever Grohl first started making music.
There were no rules whenever he picked up a record he liked, and while he was entrenched in punk music when growing up in the DC hardcore scene, there also wasn’t anyone telling him not to listen to his favourite music. If he liked to listen to Rush one day and Slayer the next, he could do it, but there weren’t many people who seemed to have the same outlook on music as he did until he heard what Josh Homme was doing.
Grohl already fell in love with Homme in the days of Kyuss when Blues for the Red Sun became one of the biggest records in his collection, but Queens of the Stone Age was when everything fit. Even before the days when Grohl was moonlighting as their drummer half the time, he was already in love with the way they wrote their melodies, and that was all down to how downright strange they were half the time.
Homme didn’t bother making tunes that tried to cater to what the pop world wanted, and Grohl thought that he was all the better for it, saying, “These guys have been making music for years, and I was a big fan of Kyuss. In the early ’90s – even then – the music they made was far more satisfying than most everything you hear in the mainstream; they’ve always been somewhat below the radar. They’ve always been making great music, but now people are starting to listen and notice.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And if you listen to the band for a few songs, you can definitely see where Grohl is coming from. Not everyone would have the chance to be able to jam out to a song that’s in 5/4 most of the time, but the way that the band work around that time signature in a tune like ‘Hanging Tree’ makes the whole thing feel a lot more ominous, especially when Mark Lanegan is the one singing over most of the track.
Sure, there would probably be a lot of people today who would complain that some of their songs are too long and confusing for the average listener, but as far as Homme was concerned, that was their problem. He lived for making music that sounded a little bit off the beaten path, and even if what he was doing wasn’t trendy, it was better for him to make music that actually had something to say, other than disposable pop music.
