Foo Fighters Want an “Experience” Linked to Each Album
With Sonic Highways, Foo Fighters got really ambitious by writing and recording every song in a 
different part of America, with special guests helping them along. In a new interview with NME, Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins says that fans should expect such large concepts from the band in the future.
“It’s not enough to just make a fucking record any more,” offered Hawkins. “It used to be a simple process of writing a batch of songs, recording them, and putting them out. You’d make an album, make three videos. If they were good, MTV would play them, and you’d sell some records. Now, you need to do something else with it.”
He continued: “Dave wants the albums to have some other kind of theme or experience linked to them. He wants every record we make from now on to have some sort of concept around it, whether it’s something as large as Sonic Highways or as simple as, ‘Hey, let’s record Wasting Light to tape in my garage.’”
When asked ‘what if’ the rest of the Foo Fighters are skeptical about an idea, Hawkins asserts that it’s “Dave’s vision” and that “It all started with him and a demo tape, and he’s always known what the best way forward for Foo Fighters is. These are Dave’s fun little records and we’re his band, we help him get it done. Even if me and Nate [Mendel] go have a burger afterwards and say, ‘Hmm, I don’t know about this,’ we’ve still got to have faith and ride it out.”
In April, Riffyou.com spoke with Mendel and asked him about the creative future of Foo Fighters.
“I’d like to do what we have set out to do, which is to find new ways of making a Foo Fighters record,” replied Mendel. “[Sonic Highways] had a theme to it and a purpose. There were elements added to what the band does – not only just doing the television show and having this documentary element – but creatively with how Dave [Grohl] was writing his lyrics and the way we chose to record.”
He added: “Foo Fighters have a sound,” offered Mendel. “Forget it, the next album is not going to sound radically different from any of the other ones – that’s kind of a given. So, it’s everything else around it that we are going to strive to make interesting, to justify another 20 years.”
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