Dave Grohl’s Monument to Mortality
With trademark ferocity, the Foo Fighters front man is tackling the capriciousness of sudden loss.
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Twenty-nine years ago, Dave Grohl, then the drummer for Nirvana, lost his singer, the band’s brilliant and vexed leader, Kurt Cobain. Last year, Grohl, now the leader of Foo Fighters, lost his drummer, the dazzling Taylor Hawkins. And then, a few months later, Grohl’s mother, Virginia, died. She was, among other things, the ne plus ultra of rock moms, a teacher by profession whose support for her charismatic, punk-loving, unscholarly (her gentle word) son was unfaltering and absolute.
One blow, then another. It was all a bit much. Grohl is an unreasonably buoyant person, but it was hard to imagine how he would pull himself out of a trough dug by such concentrated loss.
But he did. And he did so by writing his way out.
Not long after his mother died, Grohl told me that he was writing new songs—songs, he suggested, that would address, among other subjects, grief and mortality. I hoped for the best but was expecting something less. Not that anguish and moody interiority are foreign to Foo Fighters—“I Should Have Known” and “These Days,” from the 2011 album Wasting Light, could be written only by someone familiar with the capriciousness of sudden loss—but mawkishness nevertheless threatened.
These worries were needless. The latest Foo Fighters album, But Here We Are, is a soaring, frenzied guitar attack whose songs often recall the band’s best stadium-shaking anthems. But more to the point, it is filled with lyrics that feel true in their sustained confrontation with the album’s main subject: shattering absence.
Before I continue, an admission of bias: You are reading a fan’s notes, not an album review, so discount accordingly. Grohl has written for this magazine, and he and I are friends, though my love for his music predates our friendship by decades. His songs have made me happy since Scream, his first band, which he joined in 1986. Grohl’s unswerving commitment to exuberant drums-and-distortion-pedal noise makes him a hero to those of us who are waiting—in vain, most likely—for the triumphal return of rock. Foo Fighters shows are joyous communal gatherings—because of the music, of course, but also because Grohl is a self-aware rock star with superior comic timing. He is also unusually gracious to the very large number of people who lose their minds in his presence, including the middle-aged fellow who recently approached him in a restaurant, hoping to show him his Dave Grohl tribute tattoo. The tattoo was apparently located in some unspeakable place, and Grohl deftly and kindly steered the fan away from stripping.
Another acknowledgment: Grohl and I have spoken quite a bit about this album, but I’m respecting his desire, and that of the band, to let the music speak for itself. They have done no press around the album, a decision I understand personally, if not professionally.
This album, however, explains itself, even across its more elliptical songs. The ferocious title track, a genuine Foo Fighters pile driver, makes itself understood through Grohl’s throat-tearing screams: “I gave you my heart / But here we are / Saved you my heart / But here we are.”
In some ways, But Here We Are is reminiscent of The Rising, the 2002 Springsteen masterpiece, which explored the sudden void that is created by tragedy, though with less thrashing. The Rising was a response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The sadness that conjured But Here We Are into being is a more familiar, everyday one. Hawkins, in addition to being one of the great drummers of his era, was Grohl’s closest friend. The desert created by his unexpected death is the space Grohl explores with deep sincerity. In “Under You,” Grohl sings, “Someone said I’ll never see your face again / Part of me just can’t believe it’s true / Pictures of us sharing songs and cigarettes / This is how I’ll always picture you.”
There are hints of dark complication scattered across the album: In “Hearing Voices,” Grohl sings, apparently to Hawkins, “Every night I tell myself / Nothing like you could last forever / No one cries like you … / No one lies like you.” This album is an act of forthright self-exposure, an unaffected testament to the love that is organic and integral in the best friendships. “I had a person I loved, and just like that / I was left to live without him,” he describes, heartbreakingly, in “The Glass.”
Disbelief at the reality of death is threaded through these songs. The first track, “Rescued,” opens with an act of mercy for fans who have been waiting for Grohl to address the loss of Hawkins: “It came in a flash, it came out of nowhere / It happened so fast, and then it was over.”
But it is Virginia Grohl’s loss that in many ways sits at the center of this album. Reviews of But Here We Are have been uniformly positive, but I’ve also noticed some interpretative confusion among the critics. Songs that are clearly about the death of Grohl’s mother are sometimes described as tributes to Hawkins. About some songs there is no confusion. “The Teacher,” a 10-minute opus, is a tribute to Virginia, even quoting her last words to Grohl, who kept vigil bedside in her last days. “Hey kid, what’s the plan for tomorrow? / Where will I wake up? / Where will I wake up?”
“The Teacher” is followed by the album’s final track, “Rest,” a haunting song that starts with a single, mournful acoustic guitar and ends with the album’s first and only vision of peace: “Waking up, had another dream of us / In the warm Virginia sun, there I will meet you.” The plea to rest is directed at both Hawkins and Virginia Grohl. “Virginia sun” does double duty here: Grohl is a proud native of Washington, D.C.’s Virginia suburbs, and Hawkins, like the other Foo Fighters, was virtually an adopted son of Virginia Grohl’s.
Though the new album ends with the acceptance of death, Grohl is making a more complicated argument across its 10 songs: With some deaths, there is resolution—sometimes, everything that should have been said between two people actually gets said. One has the sense that this is the case with his mother. With Taylor Hawkins, there was no such resolution. He died before his time, suddenly, shockingly. Virginia’s death was despair-inducing but nonetheless part of the natural order. Hawkins’s, like Cobain’s before his, was not. Grohl has dug himself, and his band, out of a trough, but absence, to borrow from W. S. Merwin, goes through him like a thread through a needle, stitching everything with its color.
But Here We Are is the best Foo Fighters album in quite some time. Tragedy isn’t necessary to produce transcendent music. But here, it did.