The Nirvana unplugged album was something we’d always knew we were capable of doing, but it was just a matter of doing it right.
Once I got into punk rock, I started mail-ordering albums, because a lot of the record stores in my area didn’t carry the punk bands from England or Sweden or Chicago or Los Angeles.
I like the rock documentaries that make it seem real. Some rock documentaries are meant to make the bands look larger than life.
There’s nothing better than having a bottle of beer in your hand in the waves.
In a way, as much as we love to be a big, loud rock band, the acoustic album was a lot easier to make than the rock records. I think because it was brand new territory for the band.
When I sit down to interview people, I don’t hold questions and I don’t know the answers. They’re more like conversations that become lessons.
Most of our songs were written on acoustic guitar before they made it to the practice stage.
Rock stars are like sports stars: If you snap your ankle, you’re done.
A long time ago, I made a promise to myself: “Okay, you know what? I’m going to play music, and hopefully I’ll make enough money that I can go back to school. Once I make enough money to put myself through school, that’s what I’m going to do.”
Neil Young is my hero. You know what that guy has been doing for the past 40 years? Making music. That’s what that guy does.
When you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.
For every Foo Fighters record, we’ve had two or three beautiful, acoustic-based songs, but they never usually make their way to the record, because we want to make rock records.
I love Black Sabbath. They made an amazing contribution to music today. Almost every band that made it big in the Nineties owed a debt to them.
Being in Nirvana was amazing an experience that will never happen again for me. And I look on them as some of the best and worst times of my life.
Someone curating songs for you through your computer or being able to hold 10,000 songs on your watch – that convenience is pretty incredible, but so is the emotional impact of holding a Beatles record in your hand and listening to Let It Be.
I’m not like a voracious hoarder who has 50,000 albums of vinyl stacked in a storage space in the San Fernando Valley. But I do have albums from the last 40 years of my life.
We’re in this band, the Foo Fighters, making music for the love of music. We all came from bands that had disbanded, and we were drawn to each other because we missed playing.
There’s nothing I’d rather do than make music. It’s the love of my life.
My first instrument was actually the trombone, but that didn’t last long. Soon I was playing guitar in bands from the time I was 11 or 12.
I always loved writing songs – writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them.