Foo Fighters leader Dave Grohl has revealed that the band’s new album Your Favorite Toy originally had an entirely different title – until one of last year’s biggest films scuppered their plans.
“Actually, you know what I wanted to call the record?” he tells Radio X. “I wanted to call the record For Good, because that song Your Favourite Toy, at first I called it For Good. In that song, Your Favorite Toy, it says, ‘Get back, hear that boy, someone threw away your favorite toy for good.’
“And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a good not only title for the song, but also for the album.’ They could have more than a few meanings, but I’m like, ‘That’s kind of nice – For Good.’ And then that Wicked movie came out, and it’s called Wicked: For Good. And I was so pissed! So, then I changed the title of the song, and then it just became the title of the album.”
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Grohl goes on to explain the Foos’ current working process, revealing that despite their status as one of the biggest rock bands on Planet Earth, writing and recording together is still essentially a bunch of lads jamming and hashing out riffs.
“The way we function as a band, I mean, I know that all of this is much different than it was when we were young and playing in bands in a garage, but we still function like a band that plays in a fucking garage,” he says. “It’s the same thing! It’s like, you know, ‘Hey, I’ve got a riff,’ and we show it to everybody. Maybe people would imagine that we’re a lot more professional than we actually are, but really the way that we function just, you know, just within the band, it’s really similar to [Grohl’s old punk band] Scream.
We still function like a band that plays in a garage!
Dave Grohl
“This album is a good example of how it works,” he continues, “in that usually I’ll put down a rhythm guitar and then maybe a sort of melodic bit above that, almost for reference. Like, I’ll double the rhythm guitar, and then I’ll have some sort of melodic line that goes above it. But the funny thing is that nobody knows what I’m going to sing until I sing it.
“So, I don’t go to the band and say, ‘Hey guys, listen to this song idea.’ I don’t do that. We record the instrumental and nobody’s really sure what the what the vocal melody is going to be. And there have been times where everyone lays down their tracks, and then I’ll be inspired by what they do, and change the vocal melody from things that they’ve done. Anyway, so it’s always kind of a bit of a mystery. And so, when I say, like, ‘Hey, do a slide solo,’ I think maybe at that point the vocal was on the song.”
Watch the full interview below. In a glowing 9/10 review for Classic Rock, Mark Beaumont describesYour Favorite Toy as having “a real sense of rejuvenation and rebirth whichever twists it takes”, describing Grohl’s energy as that of “a post-grunge icon doing all that he knows how to do – rocking hardest through the hardest of times.”
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