UPDATE: NME reports that the Foo Fighters album will be out in November.
Here’s a new theory on how Dave Grohl has managed to maintain almost mythical levels of productivity over all these years: He might be Keyser Söze. The Foo Fighters frontman, discussing how the band’s new music is supposed to relate to its upcoming HBO series, invoked the classic supervillain-reveal moment at the end of 1995 Bryan Singer film The Usual Suspects.
“It was tricky because it’s not just a series, it’s an album,” the Nirvana drummer told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Shirley Halperin of the HBO show, to be titled Sonic Highways. “And so when you’re sequencing the series, you’re sequencing the album, so what do you sequence first? And how can you write the music before you shoot the episode? How do you know what the theme is going to be and how can you tell the story? These things would keep me up at night. I’m not only thinking about the lyric I have to spin the next day, I’m thinking about how it fits into the overall arc of the history of American music.”
He continued: “It’s meant to be the musical equivalent of the finale of Usual Suspects. Like that scene where he’s sitting there, you’re going back through the whole episode. It’s basically that.”
Grohl also opened up a bit more about the Foos’ upcoming album, which he previously said would not be “some crazy, bleak Radiohead record.” He indicated it could be only eight songs long but also the band’s longest album to date. He confirmed it was tracked directly to analog tape. And he hinted there might be horns on the LP.
“You’ll recognize Foo Fighters in this record but you’ll also be surprised by us,” he said. “We’re doing things that we’ve never done before. And I want to say that it’s only eight songs but I think it might be our longest record because, as I was writing these songs, I had to take a cinematic approach. Like I couldn’t just write a three-and-a-half-minute long KROQ jingle and film it for the finale of an episode about the history of music in New Orleans, ya know? We really had to step up what we do.”
And while the Sound City documentary has yet to release his band’s current album and accompanying HBO show, he’s already dreaming up the next one.
“I mean, I already know what we’re doing for the next Foo Fighters record and that’s even fuckin’ crazier!” he told THR. “I came up with this idea a month and a half ago. The guys were, like, ‘Dude, we have to finish this first.'”
