"The album really tells the whole story," says Foo Fighters lead vocalist and
guitarist David Grohl on the making of his band's brand new The Colour & The
Shape. "It begins with 'Doll,' which is a song about entering into something that
you weren't prepared for and being scared of that. Then you go through 11 songs
that have to do with guilt, love, the pain of losing someone... It runs the course, the
whole thing, until you get to the end, to 'New Way Home,' which is meant to be the
resolution."
Flash back to 1995-96: A platinum-plus debut LP, "Best New Artist" awards--not
to mention high marks across the board--in the Rolling Stone and SPIN readers
polls, a year and a half of sold out shows from the U.S. to Southeast Asia, the 1996 MTV Video Award for "Best
Group Video"... You'd think these guys would take some time off to rest on their laurels, to smell the flowers, to
bask in the praise and accolades...
You'd think, but you're not a member of the Foo Fighters.
August 1996 marked the end of the band's grueling touring regimen supporting the Foo Fighters album--and a
week's vacation for Grohl before composing the music for the Paul Schrader feature film Touch (on which he
once again performed virtually every note save for a few guest spots, which included John Doe of X and Veruca
Salt's Louise Post).
By early October, certified workaholic Grohl's fellow Foos had sufficiently recovered from road fatigue to begin
pre-production on the new album at the 24-track studio of Barrett Jones, with whom Grohl had co-produced the
first Foos LP.
But there was the matter of those pesky lyrics. Or as Grohl puts it, "I had nothing. Absolutely nothing."
"I had three or four weeks to write lyrics for 13 songs," He recalls. "It's strange, now, the way it's all fallen into
place. It seems like it was intended to be this thematic, conceptual thing. It wasn't, but when I look at it now... I
was joking that the cover should be just a picture of a therapist's couch. It's just weird. The way it's worked out is
just really weird. And it's liberating. The lyrics are like my therapist's notepad. Completely bizarre. I can really
say if people start asking about the last six months of my life, I can honestly say, 'Go read the lyrics.' I'm not even
saying 'Go try to figure it out from the lyrics,' just read them. It's right there."
That said, anyone who should ask those personal questions now knows what the answers will (or won't) be in
advance. As for the music, however, The Colour and The Shape is everything the first full length, full band
recording by the Foo Fighters should be. Where the first Foos record was essentially the David Grohl project
(For those terminally out of the loop: Grohl sang and played everything on the first album, with the exception of a
guest guitar turn by Afghan Whig Greg Dulli on 'X-Static'), with guitarist Pat Smear, bassist Nate Mendel and
(now former) drummer William Goldsmith joining later, The Colour and The Shape is a truly collective effort. And
Grohl has nothing but the highest praise for his fellow voices on The Colour and The Shape.
"Nate's an amazing bass player. He's so good at finding a sub-melody. I come up with a riff and I want to find a
perfect vocal melody, something that's unpredictable, clever, and not so similar to anything else. I'll think I've
found that perfect melody and I'll be singing along, thinking 'This is so great, it goes so well with the chord
progression,' and then Nate starts doing this bass thing that just blows the vocal melody away. He's just got
such a great sense of melody.
"The cool thing about Pat is I'll come up with a song and show it to him and he refuses to play the same chords
that I play. If I'm down low on the neck, he's way up there. We'll never meet. Sometimes I'll try to get him to play
something more similar to what I'm doing: 'Pat, that sounds a little weird, maybe you should come down to
where I am' and he'll just say 'No, that's OK. I like this.' It's great. The dynamic of the band has just, sort of,
expanded. You can tell on the record."
That group dynamic shows and shines throughout: On the subtle and subdued beauty of opener "Doll," the
infectious and sublime harmonies of first single "Monkey Wrench," "Everlong" and "New Way Home," the
balance of gentle melody and cathartic rage on "My Poor Brain" and "Enough Space," the epic centerpiece
"February Stars," and so on, and so on ad infinitum. The Colour and The Shape expands from the singular
voice of 1995's Foo Fighters into a work equal parts realized potential and promise for the future.
"We didn't want to make this record a lo-fi basement project," Grohl says. "I'm sort of tired of these bands who
write really amazing pop songs and record them on an 8-track for the sake of recording their album on an
8-track; people who think that's the punk rock purist thing to do. That would be the wrong thing for this band. For
these songs. There's stuff on this album where I'm singing falsetto, stuff where there's four or five guitar parts
going on at once. I just thought 'I'd rather have this sound like a Queen record than, say, a... Rapeman record.'
But we didn't make it that big a production. It's not like Guns 'N' Roses' 'November Rain' or anything. But for us,
it's a stretch. I've never done anything like this before."
Props are therefore due Gil Norton, who did a stellar, if stern, job of guiding the Foo Fighters through their first
band/producer relationship on The Colour and The Shape. "I wanted Gil because of the work he'd done with the
Pixies," Grohl recalls. "His knack for making a really fucked up sound sound really... divine. He can sort of polish
a really messy guitar sound so that it's still a messy guitar sound, but it's really clear and distinct. The clarity on
all those records is really great. You can hear everything. It's so good. I'd never met with producers before so I
had no idea what to expect. So we met up in New York and I brought along some rehearsal tapes. We sat down
and started listening to them and within two seconds he started making suggestions. He got through the verse
and the chorus of one song and he said, 'Oh, you know what you should do? You should take that guitar line and
the chorus and bridge it...' It was exactly what I imagined a producer should do."
"Plus Gil's a fucking whip-cracker," Grohl continues. "He made us do things 20 to 50 times. There's only one
first take on the entire album. I thought he was going to have a heart attack when that happened. Still, he was
like 'That sounded great. Want to try it again?' It could see the beads of sweat forming on his forehead. It's
almost like an obsessive-compulsive thing. He has to do things ten times because that next take might sound a
little better."
Six weeks spent living and recording at Washington's remote Bear Creek studios were followed by a record
two-week break to assess the work in progress (It was also during this period that Grohl found time to record
"Walking After You" at Washington DC's WGNS studio, the only demo-style track to make it on to the record; "It
was the moment. I'll never be able to capture that again"). Reconvening at Grandmaster in Los Angeles, the
band recorded the bulk of material that would become the finished album at a breakneck pace. By the final
stretch of recording, the band was bouncing between recording and mixing in the space of the same day. "I had
resigned to the idea that I was just going to be in the studio for the rest of my life," says Grohl. "By this time, it
was the middle of February. Four months of being in the studio. And the one day that I had off while we were in
L.A., I went to another studio to go fuck around. I just couldn't be out of the studio. After the record was finally
done, it took me two weeks to get used to the idea, the feeling of not being in the studio."
Following the completion of the L.A. sessions, drummer William Goldsmith made final his decision to leave the
Foo Fighters (Rumors that Goldsmith was ousted or left due to Grohl's alleged recording over his tracks have
proven unfounded, as Goldsmith has left on completely amicable terms). "The idea that I just scrapped his
tracks and did them over is just wrong," Grohl explains. "We re-did entire songs. The L.A. recordings are
different versions. Completely different. We basically re-did a lot of the record. William just felt that he didn't
want to go back out on the road again for such a long time. I don't know if he'd ever gotten used to the idea of
being in a band that would play a festival in front of 60,000 people or a headlining show for 4000. Let alone
doing things like that for a year and a half. I think William felt like he'd be more comfortable living a more stable,
grounded life."
With the record completed and new drummer Taylor Hawkins in place, it's back to work for the Foo Fighters. A
"Monkey Wrench" video directed by Grohl (Does this guy sleep?) will be completed by the time you read this,
after which the band hits the road for, well, probably longer than a year and a half this time.
