Mark Sutherland Hello Dave. On your website you say that never before have you put so much effort into an album - what exactly do you mean by that?
Dave Grohl The last two albums we've made in my basement in Virginia, but now that everyone lives in California we decided to move the basement studio out to California and build a headquaters of our own. So about a year ago we started building this place from the ground up, from scratch, with our bare hands we started building this recording studio. We had a deadline - we knew when we wanted the album to be finished, so not only did we build this Abbey Road of Los Angeles and record a double album but we did it all in under six or seven months or something like that.
Julie Cullen It's a mellow disc and a heavy disc - what was the idea behind that?
DG We've always done both types of songs and we've always had songs that were just kind of in the middle and those were the songs that always bugged me. Like, I love Motorhead, I love Slayer, I love Led Zeppelin. But I also love Neil Young & Ry Cooder and both of those dynamics are kind of extreme but that's what I love about them - they push really far in both of those directions. So, the middle ground bugged me and instead of making just one album of really aggressive songs and really mellow songs and trying to sequence them together it seemed to make more sense to split 'em up and make an album of each. It's meant to carry over into the live thing too, so we'll just do the crazy rock set with no acoustic stuff in it, just a really hard rock set at a big festival or something. then the next night we'll go to a theater and just do the acoustic stuff.
MS I guess the collaborations go in the same directions too. You've got John Paul Jones on the one hand and then Norah Jones.
DG Yeah. That one really took everyone for a loop. But to me it makes perfect sense because the song itself is a weird one for the band, it sounds like 'The Girl From Ipanema' or something. It's a bossa nove or Brazillian jazz or something. She worked so perfectly with the song and I thought it'd sound great to have a duet of my voice and a female voice and I thought of people who'd maybe seem a little more acceptable because they're closer to what we do, but if you're gonna do something like that then call a pro.
JC You have been a Foo Fighter for ten years now, much longer than you were in Nirvana - do you see this band going on forever?
DG I do now. I didn't used to. I always thought bands should have experation dates but after making this record I thought 'I could do this for the rest of my life'. It's so recording to make something so beautiful. I kinda thought the band was capable of doing something like this but the first day we recorded one of those acoustic songs, I listened back to it and thought 'Man, this is so great I could make an album like this every six months. It's so much fun!' The great thing about this band is we're like a big family - from the guy thats done our monitors for 15 years, to the guys in the band, to the children, to our wives, to even our parents.