Dave Grohl’s Monument to Mortality

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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, 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 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 , 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, , 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 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.