Night six of Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin’s Hanukkah Sessions will be a tough one to follow. Yeah Yeah Yeahs leader Karen O looked even more joyous than usual, bouncing in her sweatpants and hoodie to one of her best songs, “Heads Will Roll,” with Grohl to her left, pounding away on the kit.
“Leave it to us to get the only non-Jewish member of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Hanukkah-ize one of their signature songs,” reads the caption on the YouTube video of the performance. O has plenty to smile about as 2022 comes to an end. Over the summer, Yeah Yeah Yeahs made a triumphant return with their fifth album and first in nine years, the dynamic Cool It Down, which earned a Grammy nod for Best Alternative Music Album.
This year’s Hanukkah Sessions were filmed in front of a live audience on December 5 in Los Angeles at the Largo at Coronet Theater. This week’s earlier installments included Blood, Sweat & Tears’ “Spinning Wheel” sung by Judd Apatow, P!nk’s “Get the Party Started,” 10CC’s “The Things We Do for Love,” sung by Kurstin’s the bird and the bee bandmate Inara George, Grohl’s daughter Violet singing Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen,” and Beck performing his vintage tune “E-Pro.”
Among the songs performed at Largo that have yet to be released are Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” Rush’s “The Spirit of the Radio” sung by Tenacious D’s Jack Black, and that group’s Gass doing his best David Lee Roth impression on “Just a Gigolo” / “I Ain’t Got Nobody.”
