Foo Fighters, Grohl, dream of midnight

USA TODAY, February 2021

Last March, Dave Grohl and his family flew to their home in Hawaii for spring break. "It turned into 3 1/2 months," Grohl says with an exasperated laugh. His band, Foo Fighters, already had their new album in the can and ready for release when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. "There was this series of conversations like, 'Should we do it now?' 'It's not a good time.' 'What about now?' 'No, no.' " After months of sitting on new music, waiting for a sense of normalcy to return, "everyone realized that wasn't going to happen anytime soon," he continues. "We made these songs to share and it's time to share them."

"Medicine at Midnight," out Friday, is a departure of sorts for the raucous hard rock band, which Grohl formed in 1994 after Nirvana broke up due to Kurt Cobain's death. The nine-track effort is produced by hitmaker Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia), who shepherds the group into David Bowie-esque pop.

"It's almost like two records in one," says drummer Taylor Hawkins. "You've got your disco, dancey, groove-oriented album, and then other half is pretty traditional Foo Fighters rock music. So if you don't like the dancey bits, just fast forward."

On a recent Zoom call from his Los Angeles home, Grohl, 52, told USA TODAY about the making of "Medicine at Midnight" and more:

Q: Taylor Hawkins said you recorded this album in a haunted house. What's that all about?

Dave Grohl: So there was a house down the street from where I live that I actually rented about 10 years ago. It was an old house built in the '40s, I believe - just the quintessential creepy house. The person that owns the place told me stories like, "Oh, Joe Cocker used to party here with the guy that played Grizzly Adams."

When I lived there, I didn't consider it to be a spooky house. My kids did. My daughter, Harper, would see things and other people in her room at night, but she was 3 years old at the time. I mean, I did the same thing. But when we came back to record this (album), everybody felt creeped out and you could go one of two ways: You could run screaming out the front door with your tail be tween your legs or you could put your head down and make nine songs and then get the (expletive) out of there. That's basically what we did.

Q: Did you ever see any ghosts?

Grohl: I've never been that paranormal experience television show type person. I've never wandered around my basement with infrared goggles looking for heat sensors. The worst part is just feeling it. It's not like you're seeing floating bed sheets and vomiting pea soup - it's like you feel somebody next to you or hear footsteps or have reoccurring dreams of an old woman in a muddy sweater barefoot in your living room. Things like that.

Q: Do you feel it influenced the music in any way?

Grohl: I don't think it's a spooky record - I think it's a party record. Maybe whatever was in that house influenced us to make our first boogie-rock production. So hallelujah! Whatever the (expletive) it was, it worked.

Q: Did you specifically set out to make a party record?

Grohl: It was entirely intentional. Knowing that 2020 would be our 25th anniversary and this was our 10th album, I decided the best way to celebrate would be with groove. What a bummer if we made some orchestrated acoustic dirge to celebrate our retirement. That's not how I roll. I'm the last guy at the bar every (expletive) night. So I wanted this to be the soundtrack to that. We all grew up loving Sly and the Family Stone, (Jimi) Hendrix, Steely Dan, David Bowie, and rock 'n' roll that makes you want to move. This is the album you do the Molly Ringwald ("Breakfast Club") dance to.

Q: The song "Waiting on a War" was based in part on a nightmare you had as a kid, and the concept for the "Shame Shame" video also came from a dream. Do you find that's where you get some of your most creative ideas?

Grohl: I have crazy dreams every night. This week's theme: I'm a cosmonaut preparing to go to space. In the first one I had, Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age - who's a dear friend of mine - and I were getting suited up and training in those crazy G-force things to go on a mission. Two days later, I had the same dream, except now it's Taylor Hawkins. I remember all my dreams incredibly vividly. So when I referenced those dreams that inspired "Shame Shame" or "Waiting on a War," I can still picture them in my head like they just happened. It's a wonderful source of inspiration because it's like a limitless imagination.

Q: Are there any other songs on this album that were pulled from dreams?

Grohl: Those are kind of the two. I mean, "Waiting on a War," to me, is the most important song on the album. It was written for my daughter, Harper, when she one day asked, "Daddy, are we going to war?" It brought me back to myself at 10 or 11 years old, and my greatest fear was dying in a nuclear war. So when she asked me that, it broke my heart because it made me think that maybe every generation has that same fear. And what a hopeless way to just lose your childhood to that. I hope she feels she has something to look forward to because there's got to be more to life than that.

Q: As a parent, how's it been trying to talk to your kids about everything this past year? (Grohl has three daughters with his wife Jordyn Blum: Violet, 14, Harper, 11, and Ophelia, 6.)

Grohl: They've consoled me. I remember four years ago, the night of the election, my wife and I didn't expect the election would go the way it did. We had a bottle of champagne and we were gonna make dinner. And as I blasted through that bottle and watched those numbers go up (for Donald Trump), my daughter was consoling me. She was explaining the electoral process to me, like, "No, Daddy, they haven't counted Washington state yet." It was very sweet. She's a very empathetic kid. But that night, I put her to bed and said, "You just have to have hope and keep fighting the good fight."

That seemed to be the theme for the next four years and it still applies today. I am a hopeful person in general. I truly believe that as long as human beings are capable of compassion and love, there's hope.

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