you continue to amaze me david grow there is so much dancing to be done to this record and yet somehow you have not sacrificed a rock it's incredible um look at you all growed up with your modern day disco classic it's unreal you know listen here's the thing is i i guarantee that most musicians have that that groove or that vibe somewhere
within them um they just may have never found the right time or place to let it out you know and so and i think over time if you've been in a band for a long time you get sort of comfortable in that place that people are familiar with you know like oh they're at rock band they're going to make a song that sounds
like this um but you know in in some sort of uh attempt at longevity like you just have to be able to sort of reach out and and and try things that you've never done before and i mean i'm a drummer it's like you know i love trouble funk and i love the gap band and i love you know there was always funking you're
playing there was always funk in your playing even if you trace it back to those nirvana records you know you you bought as much swing as you could as much as you were allowed i remember i i explained that one time to pharrell when i was interviewing pharrell and i said i said yeah you know like if you listen to nirvana's nevermind like
those are disco beats dude he's like what do you mean and i was like that cracker crack i'm like that is straightforward totally for sure when we started making this record it was like okay let's go there let's do it i just love that you took the supposed time off which you do all you know sporadically throughout your life i'm taking time off
you're not the only one rolling your eyes mate even i'm rolling my eyes and i'm not like i'm not even in your family i mean i don't i don't know what i don't know what that term mean really i mean like i remember actually once maybe like about 20 years ago i was sitting on my couch in virginia and i remember like my body relaxed
and my eyes kind of closed halfway and i let it i let myself do that for like five minutes and i'm like oh my god i think i'm relaxed like what what is this like i'm not moving or saying anything and i feel like i'm floating that this is this is i never want to do this again so meditation is not on the daily ritual
oh my god listen i've had more than a few people say dave meditate and i'm like dude that's like throwing someone who can't swim into a deep deep pool um well you took some anyway you came off the last tour you took some i don't know there's that great letterman quote isn't it that is before you take time off to spend with your family you should
check with your family first um you know what's it like when you sort of decide that it's time for you to not be dave grohl in the rock and roll band which your family i'm sure to some degree has gotten used to that rhythm of and and get to it you know experience and celebrate that with you um but then you come home and you switch it off
um what kind of person are you are you a nightmare to be honest it feels a lot more foreign to me to like jump up on a huge stage in front of a ton of people than it does to like wake someone up in the morning and make them pancakes and eggs and get their virtual learning started like you know i actually tried to keep
the two very connected so that it doesn't seem like some weird jekyll and hyde thing like i love artists that go up on stage and become someone that they're not when the lights are off you know like you know a guy you grew up loving kids grew up loving bowie i watched an artist like alice cooper or marilyn manson people that like
put on the thing and then they go do it and then they you know then they jump in the minivan and take their kid to the bus stop i don't know if i could do that like it would feel too weird to me and actually it was a realization i had once where i thought oh i get it the best way to do it is if you go up and you just be yourself
like that works better for me i you know as much as i i love a band like slipknot i'm like oh yeah like that those are you know these are aliens these are superheroes these are like i love that i don't think i could do it like i couldn't walk up there if i didn't feel like myself so i mean the first time i ever saw slipknot was at a german
rock and roll festival on album one when that when the masks were found on the side of the street and the boiler suits were homemade and it was like it was me it was yeah it was raw and it was me and it was tommy vance late great tommy vance and a few others on the side of stage and i just remember the clown coming up
amongst this plume of smoke with his drumstick making this i'm gonna slit your throat action and i genuinely thought none of us are getting off the stage alive like and i feel i feel foolish thinking about it now because it's like i've met him so many times but it was scary well you know it's weird because i remember like
i didn't get into the misfits until really this year because my 14 year old daughter was like dad listen to the misfits like now i've got my kid getting me in that's sick but one of the one of the reasons why i feel like i never connected to it was uh it wasn't musical it was it was i mean it wasn't their music it was it
was the aesthetic where i'm like okay so wait a minute like say the guy like ran out of toilet paper he's gotta run to the corner shop is he gonna have like the the devil's lock and the thing on his face when he goes to pay for his toilet paper like i couldn't get it but yeah i mean i've always thought like i'd hate
to to be confined by this claustrophobic uh feeling that like you have to be the guy on stage when you go to buy the toilet paper and so i thought like all right well i'm gonna walk up on stage like the guy that had to go by the toilet but it's funny because the more you become yourself which is you know as you as you grow as a human
being and and you mature you carry that with you with the food fighters and become more and more successful every step of the way that doesn't always happen a lot of your peers haven't been so lucky you know and but then when i think about you as a young as a younger rock star even the first couple of foo fighters albums there was some swagger
there like i remember you coming out and there was you know you were yourself but there was also like you know the clothes were kind of it was all pretty coordinated the hair was pretty slick like it was like you were sort of having a crack at it for a minute there and i wondered what rockstar felt like to you when you felt like you
maybe had to try it i think that that was probably my most insecure i've ever been in my entire life just feeling like feeling like i couldn't you know walk up and be myself when we first started the band you know i've never like really stood in front of an audience with a microphone in my face and a guitar in my hand
it's one of the reasons why i decided to do it i was like i've never done this before i might as well got nothing to lose let's just let's try it but i i definitely had like raging insecurities whether it was you know how i looked or what i said or how i moved and all these things that i'm sure a lot of artists have been through the
same thing and and maybe feel you know even longer in their career but um yeah it was funny you know recently we did this sort of 25th anniversary special where we looked at photos of ourselves from over the last 25 years and um oh god i mean you know it's like looking through a yearbook and seeing like your teeth haven't grown
in yet and you had glasses and braces and you couldn't believe you had a haircut it's like that and if it's exactly the same because you know we've been in this band so long we've we've basically grown up in this band you know like when we started that i was 25 or 26 years old and i'm 52 years old i've spent over half my
life with nate and pat and taylor and um you know it becomes something more than musical it's just like okay yeah i know we're a band i know we make records and we go out and play shows and but it's so much deeper than that at this point it's a lot deeper god i just remember pat man i remember when you
guys first came out like pat was just like oh talk about swagger unbelievable yeah the way he would play guitar like it was the most fun thing like there is nothing else on the planet that matters right now than you watching me play guitar yeah so the first day he showed up for a nirvana rehearsal i was like oh oh my god the guitar
player of the germs is going to be here i mean i grew up listening to the germs and that was a long time ago and they were dangerous man that was like some los angeles yeah that was guttural guttural yeah and so and he showed up as pat smear does and i was just so blown away it was just not what i expected and you know the energy
that he brings to the stage with the foo fighters and the energy that he brings to every room he walks into was the same energy he brought to nirvana and that last year of the band that pat was with us it was like it transformed the experience into something else and he really did bring so much happiness and joy but you know
like i don't know if you remember but the first few years of the foo fighters pat was the host of mtv's house of style wait what was he had to remember this yes like pat was a king he was a host of mtv's house of style so he would interview designers and supermodels and things like that and he fit in perfectly it was like oh my god
you know i thought he was quitting the foo fighters when he did back then i thought like oh he's just going to be the host of house of style like he could have been he could have been the host of project right now could have been the host of project runway i was going to say the same thing you could easily held that down do you know what i
mean yeah easily easily when you have like the most punk rock of all time who's also the host of house of style who also his favorite artist of all time is mariah carey it's like that's the guy you want to be in a bit 100 dude with like chaos uk tattoos all over him you want pap smear while we're talking about the
legendary pats mirror and we're going deeper than i think you and i've ever gone before i want to stay there for a second because i've never had a chance to ask you this i went to the tibetan freedom concert in 1998 and i watched you guys come out in the afternoon and play a blinder and it was everything i wanted that day
was you guys just came out and brought joy to the world and i just and a lot of my eyes were on pat the whole time and then not long after that you know pat decided to leave and i've never had a chance to ask you just what kind of hole that left for you because not just your friend but just the energy and charisma on stage
you know that was a tough one that was really tough and it was really early on you know it was before the second record even came out that he decided he didn't want to do it anymore and um you know when we started the band we didn't really have a plan you know we just knew that we wanted to play and we played as many shows as we could
we put thousands of miles on our van it was a solid year and a half of just constant contouring and it really took a lot out of us you know as much as it inspired us i think that we had sort of waded in so deep we realized like oh man this is you know this is not just doing gigs on the weekend this is something
else and and that was something pat had never really experienced even when pat joined nirvana um by the time he joined nirvana we were you know we were on a tour where we were on buses and doing three shows a week as so as to save kirk's voice and things like that so we dove in head first with the foods and i think at the end of it
you know it's it seemed like okay we're doing this again this is serious and i i he you know he basically said i'm just not really into it anymore and to be perfectly honest i was on my knees literally on my knees begging him to stay i cried i begged him to stay because i didn't know if i could do it without him um and you know he very kindly said like
i'm just not into it dude i'm just not into it like what you know you can't make someone love you you know you can't change someone's mind really yeah and so i realized like okay but the beginning of this band represented something more than musical to me it was a continuation of life after losing everything and i thought
i can't stop here you know i have to keep going like i started this band to keep going and now i have to keep going and when he left the band it definitely you know it there was a void there there was a big hole um that we couldn't necessarily fill so but we just kept going you know we just kept going and then years later we reunited
and we hugged and cried and said like come on stupid let's go and that was a long time ago so many happy endings you know you've got to go through the trials and tribulations to get to a happy ending right and from a happy ending you get to a new beginning and yesterday at the time of recording well we got to a brand new beginning
and look at this 25 years 25 years after the band formed i turn on the inauguration after a long day at work i'm getting all these messages how beautiful it is but my head's down i'm focused and thank goodness i turned it on when i did because the first mug i saw was you and the first band i saw was your band and you know i love you guys
and i watched you play just the most beautiful stirring just wonderfully arranged version of times like these that that just was so in line with the with the occasion but also so perfectly in tune with who you are as a band you were entirely yourselves how was that experience i gotta ask you it was crazy man it shouldn't be too
much of a surprise to anyone that we would accept that type of invitation you know a lot of people prefer uh that their artists remain apolitical you know like sometimes when you when you dip your toe into the political arena people get really worried you know we're we're not rage against the machine by any means but
of course you know there are certain things that we believe in and when we're uh invited to be a part of something like this i consider it an honor and i mean having grown up in washington dc it's like these things are more than just sort of like political spectacle like my dad was a republican speechwriter like i kind of
i know i've seen a little bit of the behind the scenes stuff so um but yeah to be included was uh it was an honor and the weird thing was that we filmed that like maybe about a week or a week and a half ago live in our studio in los angeles and we sent it to them so when it came on tv i was sitting there with a beer and a
tie-dye shirt watching this just thinking like this is so surreal this is so strange you know and um and i was getting texts from all of my friends at home like dude you didn't say you were coming that was like what do you do why didn't you call and i'm like no no it's we it's pre-recorded don't worry about it but um but you know there have been a
few times where we've performed for um political campaigns or uh or presidents and there's something about it that sort of humanizes the process to me like when john kerry was running as the democratic candidate against george w bush i went on the campaign trail with him and i would sing acoustic songs at his rallies
you know the bus would stop at the little town square and the people would come out to listen to the candidate explain their position on certain things you know and that was really inspiring because it it humanized the democratic process it was like okay these people are coming out they're not all democrats they're some
of them don't know who to vote for but they want to listen to what the person has to say before they make their choice and i wrote in your honor after that trip i wrote best of you i wrote uh uh resolve songs like that and um so it it to me it's inspiring to be a part of these things because it it humanizes
the the process to me personally you know i'm glad you mentioned those songs and and also you know you have done this like throughout your career and your music you have found a way to inspire and draw people into the conversation without necessarily being you know hardline political to your point not doing what rage do at times
what eddie has done going on stage bush liga you know i respect and appreciate every time an artist is absolutely my line is i never expect it but i respect it when they do right one of the things that i've noticed over the years as the band's popularity has grown is that um our audience has become a lot more diverse so our music is
somehow bringing people together that may not otherwise spend two and a half hours right with each other right yeah whatever it is that brings them to the gig they'll all get together and they'll sing my hero they'll all get together and they'll sing best of you they'll all get together and sing along whatever it is and they'll all
sing it for all of these different reasons so i appreciate and respect um the the power of music to do that to bring everyone together not a lot of things can do that not a lot of things do that and maybe that's what we've been really missing if you think about the way that everything has come to a head
in the last 12 months and there's a lot of different moving factors to that but it shouldn't be ignored that the fact that we don't get that opportunity to come together as a community despite our differences has caused a much more extreme linear belief system yeah i mean i think that people have to somehow on some things agree to disagree
i mean there's there's some things that i'm like you know i'm fiercely opposed to and against um but i having been raised by a republican father and sort of a liberal democrat mother um i i had to sort of navigate this middle place at the same time stand up for the things that i believe in i think that music is something that can
bring us together at least in a moment um but at the same time you have to you have to fight for the things that you really believe in and there's certain things that i'm very against so therein lies the unique chemistry makeup of every individual human being right can you walk the line between the two things can you be an empath and can you also be
very specific about your beliefs it's not easy you know it and you know as you as you grow older your opinions change it gets harder but it's funny because there's a song on this album which really takes me back to a very specific memory that i had and i was so glad i wasn't alone you wrote a song waiting on a war because of that feeling that you got
like the world was going to end and you know you and i you know of a similar age group and i remember being in that in that house i remember specifically going to bed while the light was it was still light so i was that young and asking my parents what happens if there's a nuclear war and you know my mum's saying something
like well you know it's afraid to complete so we're going to go out in the middle of the road and we're just going to spend our last few minutes together not sure that was the right advice for a kid but she was doing her best right to try to say it but she has to try to say there's nothing you could do about it yes it set
me on a different path but anyway that's neither here nor there but the point is he wrote it sugarcoated but she wrote a song about it and it really touched me because it really was this kind of fear and we felt that again now we're feeling that sense of fatal complete again well i don't know if that fear's ever gone away
i mean you know you look at some of those propaganda films from the 50s and 60s and you've seen how um you know people can be kept in that in that place of fear sometimes you buy the powers that be yeah it's a tactic the submission and the tactic of keeping people in fear and unfortunately you know i guess that i
i was i was hopeful that maybe it was just me i was hopeful that maybe it was my generation that maybe it was just that time in the early 80s um where you know we had the reagan administration and the conflict it just felt like missiles were pointed in every direction that's what it just felt like to me as a kid like you could
never escape there was a missile pointed at new zealand as weird as that is to say yeah same and so but i would have these dreams where i would see the missiles going up over my backyard or i would see or i'm in my backyard and like and a soldier would come out from behind a tree and i'd start running they'd shoot me in the back and
there was this movie in the 80s called the day after i don't know if you remember this yeah i did oh my god how terrifying like unbelievable like so as we were making the album this is last fall this is fall of 2019. i was taking my daughter harper to school and she looked at me and she said um dad is there going to be a war and i
said well what makes you say that and i guess that she had either seen something online she's 11 years old if she'd seen something online or maybe saw something on the news that um you know that that gave her this anxiety and this fear that there was going to be a war and it immediately took me back to when i was her age
and then i just it made me so sad it broke my heart that that she was feeling the same way i did when i was young and that you know that any child should lose their childhood to this overwhelming feeling of like hopelessness and fear and uh and this i mean there's so much more to life than just that dark feeling like you have to find
the good but so i wrote the song waiting on a war that day and um and you know at the time i wrote it for my daughter harper and like when i listened with in the last few weeks having listened to that song as we're like preparing the video and editing the single and stuff i'm listening to i'm like god if this song
doesn't apply to right now holy i mean it's crazy there are lots of moments on the record based on the timeline versus now where and we saw this with the run the jules album and everything else where art and reality are really meeting in some crazy crossroads here where it's almost like you're just seeing around the corner of what's coming i
mean that's what you hope to achieve as a writer but you can only tell your truth at the time it just turns out it's true now there's not a lot of foresight when you're writing songs usually you're usually sort of like in this introspective place where well i'm usually sitting on the floor of the vocal booth and everyone's like dave
come on let's go let's go and so but you know in a way you could write some of your most revealing lyrics because you don't have enough time to self-edit you're just going like that and you're just like writing whatever's like racing through your brain but when i listen back to the things that i wrote whatever a year and a half
ago um a lot of those things do apply to what's going on right now but mostly you know those feelings are i'm not the only one that feels this way like i'm not the only one that feels the way i feel when i sing making a fire or shame shame or whatever uh no son of mine songs like that it's like they're pretty like
universal emotions that most people feel and um and they and they can apply to you know different periods in your life but a lot of the songs i listen back like medicine at midnight i was doing an interview with someone and they're like it was a japanese person they're like um medicine at midnight are you referring to the vaccine and i'm
like no i'm not i'm referring to like a whiskey before bed it's a different kind of vaccine i mean when i listened to the other the first time no disrespect intended but i was pretty clear to me perhaps because i've had a whiskey with you here and there that it was clearly that's clearly what you're writing about
yeah i don't need a prescription for that medicine you're right about things like shame shame we talked a bit about that at the end of last year and it is one of those things i've never heard really beautiful you know actually put on record in the way you did it given a personality given a physical form um you know more than just you you
externalized it it's something that just gets internalized so effectively because it is a killer i mean shame is one of the great killers and uh you know yet somehow you gave it a face and you made it into something that was useful and i've just always really tried to reject shame i've always tried to get past it i've always felt
that it's a very toxic experience there's there's some things that are just difficult to to feel and i don't mean that it's they're difficult to to literally feel but it you know they're just they're hard to to face you know um i think it's one of the reasons why a lot of people go to therapy and have someone to talk about
uh to talk about these things with because um because god forbid that you just like bottled them up inside fortunately i have a place to put these emotions you know um whether it's you know on a sheet of paper in front of a microphone or in front of thousands of people uh under the lights at a rock show if i didn't have anywhere to to express
these things or to put these things i wouldn't be as happy as i am um it's a strange thing to say but there has to be some sort of balance like i hope that everybody has some way to express these things that they're not willing to to uh confront and with that song in particular it's like everything just sort of fell into place
you know the dynamic of the song the mood of the song the tone of the melody the uh the visual it just you know all of these things came together so that they ultimately the sound and the lyric and the visual does personify something really specific and that doesn't happen all the time no it's really it's intense and intense
listen to your point um you get to sing these songs and in many respects people go to therapy because they get to see somebody reflect back upon them a interpretation of something that you can't get past thereby untangling the knot now when you get to sing those songs in front of thousands of people and people
like those songs so they sing it back to you and they scream shame shame back at you they feel the same way they feel the same way but they're going to be going i didn't even think of that it's a big game it's a bit cersei you know what i mean it's a little bit cersei yeah oh no god damn it zayn that's terrible well you know what
strange as you were saying that i may have told you this before because we've done so many interviews over the last 25 years when i was a kid i used to have this cassette player my mother gave it to me i think for christmas for my birthday and it was just like one of those portable cassette players with a handle on it right
i would put cassettes of my favorite music on as i went to sleep i'd hit play i put it on my windowsill right next to my bed then i had these blank cassettes and i would put them in and i would hit record and i would talk about my problems this is maybe when i was like 13 or 14 years old i would hit record and i would just talk
about what was going in my on in my life like the things in high school and things with my father and things like i would i was like revealing my innermost feelings to a cassette tape and then i would hit stop and i would rewind it hit play and i would fall asleep listening to myself talk about my problems whoa isn't that
weird i don't know why i did it i don't know for how long i did it but in this weird way it gave me this whole other lens or perspective on it because they weren't just in my mind i was hearing myself saying these things and so i had cassettes or just filled with the most depressive teenage and i would fall asleep
listening to them almost like someone listens to like rain clouds and river beds and i love that you know why i love that you know i mean yeah i got i really do hope your mom still has them someday and at some point maybe if you're 60th they come out and burn those kids dude i bet you did i bet you did but the thing is right
i kind of love the fact that you had enough self-awareness to realize that by actually externalizing it again you kind of de-controlled it it lost its control over you it became this thing that was no longer real first of all i mean i inadvertently stumbled into that it wasn't like some sort of decisive therapeutic process it was just like
i'll just talk about how much and then pissed at myself it's similar to when i hear a foo fighters song on the radio yeah so if i hear a song like best of you if it comes on it's not unlike me listening to my problems on those cassettes it's like oh my god i'm hearing myself say these things hey dave how haunted are we talking
about this place in encino have you ever been in a haunted house or have you ever lived in a place that just felt off yeah when i lived in seattle from like about 1993 to 1997 i lived in a house there was a new house on the edge of the woods north of seattle that definitely had something or someone else in it right i
never made a huge big big deal out of it i was never one to like be overly concerned or spooked by that kind of thing but it's weird went on you know they're like noises and doors opening and footsteps and dreams and the feeling that someone's as you're sleeping right in your face yeah yeah yeah reoccurring dreams of a barefoot
woman in a muddy dress and sweater with her like reoccurring dreams of this same person just staring at me from the living room or staring at me from the basement or staring like things like that and it went on and on and on and on and it was weird but i stayed in the house and i didn't move away but this house i had a lot of the similar
that similar energy it was like things would happen when we weren't there we'd come back to the studio and you know a session would be reopened or different there were things added to sessions that we didn't necessarily put there something like moved or detuned or the feeling of someone being next to you or behind you in specific places either
in a stairwell or in specific rooms and you know i lived in this house for a year 10 years before we made the record there really so you remembered it and decided to go back there based on your experience of living there well the experience when i had living there wasn't like spooky to me but it was to my kids so my daughter harper
would see things in the corner of her room that i just thought at the time she's like two or three years old and i thought you know that's a two or three year old kid but she saw things that i didn't and um but then and and i looked i rented it for a year while we were remodeling my house and then when we went back there do more stuff
it was weird like you know a bit it to me when you make a record i would hate to just like wander into some sterile laboratory studio where a million bands have made records and then just kind of like get creative like that's to me it's more about the experience and the communal experience of doing it somewhere that sort of
challenges the process like in a basement the sonic highways episodes like all of those different places and so doing it in a house like that only added to the experience you know it also made them want to get the out of there yeah because i was going to say the record was done really fast and then i read why and i
was like no yeah it was like in terms of experience because i remember seeing footage of you guys recording in utero and you were in you went up was it i'll be any space where did you go you went to the middle of nowhere wasn't it like snowing the whole time and it was just brutal yeah it was in um cannon falls minnesota in
february and i mean that's when like the high is five degrees below zero like that's as warm as it's gonna get that day and it was this house that had a studio not connected to it but about 50 yards from the house the house is amazing it was this cool sort of like mid-century architectural type that almost looked like a frank lloyd wright
sort of thing has swimming pool in the house and then there was a 50-yard walk to the to the studio itself it is a beautiful place but you know it was cold i mean i was done with the drums in the first like three days me and albini and the guys we tracked the drums super fast i mean that record was like one or
two takes for each song now yeah we spent another week there as kurt did the vocals but again it was like cool let's record this and get them out of here what was the one that you didn't want to end what was the session was the one that you recorded at home with butch where it was just like you just get to walk down the road and up
you know walk down the driveway and up into your garage was that the one that was an amazing experience my only problem with the making of wasting light which we did in my house was that i would wake up every morning and literally mop the floors mopping the hardwood floors with a bucket because it's my house there's like beer
cans everywhere you know you would do the same thing totally but um yeah so but when we made our third record nothing left to lose i had just moved back to virginia after being away for six or seven years or no longer i don't know a while bought this house in the neighborhood where i grew up built a studio in the basement
we we weren't signed to a record label at the time we were let out of our contract and so we built our own studio in the basement it was springtime springtime in virginia is so beautiful man like the leaves start coming back and and the cherry blossoms are out and now you can go outside and t-shirt and we were barbecuing almost every
night and playing basketball and drinking beer every day and it was the most relaxed that record i could have made that record for a year that was it was such a it was like it was like kids in a treehouse it was so much it sounds like it that album is light on its feet in that regard too i mean even when you think of a song like aurora and
you just think about the way that it drifts in and out of consciousness right it really does feel very peaceful like you've made at home it's like that's a homecoming song that song to me it's like that's what you listen to when you're driving the last five miles home oh that's so cool yeah i mean you know
that was also a big time of discovery for the band because when we made that record it was just nate and taylor and i and i think it was the first time we really felt connected as like a creative unit it was like all right like now we get each other now we're a band let's do what we want to do and i mean also at the time all we were listening
to was like 70s am gold music it was like jerry rafferty and andrew gold and 10 cc so we you know and you know bands like corn and then biscuit cold chamber like there were all these yeah new metal bands that were huge going like lit this kid stuff like that and we were like no man we want to sound like 10 cc
that was pretty cool it worked and it also kind of like you know for me it was one of those moments where i realized that you could do you could do absolutely anything i think about how far you've come in from the van to now and and i can't wait to see the documentary what drives us how's that going i mean are we going to see that this year
it's great i mean we're in post-production right now so yeah i mean it's gonna it's gonna happen like really soon it's gonna happen it's coming quick can't wait and it's great i watched the final cut the other day and you know one of the great things about it is that um it will remind you of your love
of live music and it's i mean of course right now everybody's in that place where they're starved for it and they just want to like kick down the front door and run outside the nearest stage you know but um but to hear all of these like legendary artists talking about their love of the live show um it sort of flips it a little bit and
it makes you really want to get it back it's pretty incredible how you've been able to reflect you know and as we near the end of this conversation man it's important to to acknowledge that you've been able to reflect on the legacy at 25 years and yet continue to move forward and i wonder what that balance was like and
because you know i always thought of you as someone who once you got that shot once you found that that lane for yourself with foo fighters you just ran you just ran like like there were times we'd do interviews in other parts of the world and i feel like you would leave the studio and run off to the next thing you barely really have time to say
goodbye you just be running to the next thing you wanted to do and then to be encouraged to pause and think about legacy you know how did it make you feel last year under these circumstances doing it i honestly i'm not good at thinking about it like i'm good at thinking about other things i'm not good at like really like i said that one time i sat
on the couch and my eyes started to close and i felt this relaxed feeling i was like this like i was so not into it in the same way you know i'm i'm just happy that we've survived you know i i'm i'm happy to be in the place where we are right now and i know that we're here because all of the things that have came before
but um but you know i don't necessarily want to spend too much time celebrating all of that because that's just going to keep me that that to me is sitting on the couch with your eyes half closed it's like i don't want to do that i want it like i've already had nine cups of coffee i know what we do today is that when you started writing last
year you were writing tales and stories and anecdotes rather than kind of personal reflections it felt very much like you're a voyeur of your own experience rather than telling a biography type autobiography type experience you know it's one of the reasons but first of all when everything shut down i had a real
uh fear of of becoming complacent or like stagnant or just like oh my god nothing's happening i just made a record i'm not gonna write a bunch more songs like what i'm gonna do and i thought oh this is this is something that i've never had the time to do and i honestly thought okay this is gonna bring people
like five minutes of happiness or joy in their day like i'm gonna write this i'm going to write this true story about hang out with pantera i'm going to write this true story about when david bowie told her stop i'm going to write and i thought okay well you know these are good because i'm a loud mouth like i never shut up
and so why not put it on some instagram page where people can like giggle you know like like read it but then it it it became like an obsession of mine where i was like oh my god i have to do this more oh my god i have to do this more and i just kept writing i mean i kind of stopped posting stuff on that thing but dude i've been writing my
ass off there's got to be something in the pipeline there because they're too entertaining and you have too many stories it's in that same sort of short story format that i write all of these things part of it is to entertain but another part of it is to sort of explain to people my perspective because you have to imagine like
watching something like that inauguration i mean i'm sitting on a couch at a tie-dye with the coors light watching the foo fighters as if like it's they're another band you know i'm not like wow me yay i'm just like god this is weird and so that's kind of the perspective i write all of these things from
which i'm sure most anyone would relate to like how the would you feel you know how would you feel if you're like on an email exchange with bowie it doesn't seem real and in a lot of the ways in a lot of ways it's almost like your life flashing before your eyes as it happens so it's it's it's a really weird thing but i love writing it's
great man it's been so good to see this album is fantastic bro there's so much groove and so much honesty and truth you know really is you know and and you know for you guys to be at this point making records as vital as this and i can't wait to get whatever format that those stories take um what does it feel like this year going
forward for you i mean obviously we've got a new president which is beautiful but beyond that i try not to get caught up too much in trying to predict things because i feel like you know it's it's like that old saying that you know worry is like a rocking chair gives you something to do but doesn't get you anywhere no that's good in that
same way it's like you can predict as much as you like in life but ultimately life's just gonna take you where it leads you know there's you can't necessarily control everything so you know to me it's like i'm i'm gonna make it to the end of this interview and then i'm gonna walk out there and see what i need to do for the kids i'd
like is there milk in the fridge like do i have what are my responsibilities for the day and i mean honestly it's as simple as that and knowing that that we're not necessarily in control of um of any sort of prediction like okay so i think it's gonna be fall i mean listen when john silva calls up and says hey you got an offer to play blah blah
blah do you want to book it i say absolutely book it and i cross my fingers and i hope that it happens you know because once it opens up dude i mean i don't know how many shows i just booked but like once it opens up i'll be there but i do realize that the most important thing is that it's safe to do and it's safe for everyone
that takes everyone to get there you know i think it's important that people realize like we have to look out for each other you know we have to like we're in this together so let's like get together and get through it and you know i cross my fingers and hope it's sooner than later but all i can say is i'll see you there