Song Exploder - Foo Fighters - The Teacher

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

For the last episode of the year, I got the chance to drive up to Northridge, California, and have a conversation with Dave Grohl. We talked about the Foo Fighters song “The Teacher,” which is an epic, 10-minute-long song. Dave told me it’s the most important piece of music he’s ever written, because it’s dedicated to his mother, Virginia, who passed away in 2022. Dave Grohl started Foo Fighters in 1994, after Nirvana ended. This year, Foo Fighters set a record for having the most Top 10 hits on the Billboard Mainstream Rock charts. They’ve won 15 Grammy awards, including winning the Grammy for Best Rock album five times — more than anyone else. “The Teacher” is from their 11th album, But Here We Are, which came out in June 2023. I sat with Dave in the Foo Fighters practice space, and he told me the whole story of the song. Coming up, you’ll hear the two voice memos he originally recorded on acoustic guitar, plus the two demos he made on his way to figuring the song out. For more, visit songexploder.net/foo-fighters.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This episode contains explicit language. For the last episode of the year, I got the chance to drive up to Northridge, California, and have a conversation with Dave Grohl. We talked about the foo fighter song, The Teacher, which is an epic 10-minute-long track. Dave told me it's the most important piece of music he's ever written, because it's dedicated to his mother, Virginia, who passed away in 2020. Dave Grohl started Foo Fighters in 1994 after Nirvana ended. This year, Foo Fighters set a record for having the most top ten hits on the Billboard mainstream rock charts.

They've won 15 Grammy Awards, including winning the Grammy for Best Rock album five times, more than anyone else. The teacher is from their 11th album, but here we are, which came out in June 2023. I sat with Dave in the Foo Fighters practice space, and he told me the whole story of the song. Coming up, you'll hear the two voice memos. he originally recorded on acoustic guitar, plus the two demos he made on his way to figuring the song out. My name's Dave Grohl. Last year, I went through a period of really deep mourning

because I lost two very important people in my life. One is Taylor Hawkins, our drummer. The other was my mother. She passed in July of 2022, And I was with her for all of the time leading up until her passing. Every day during that period, I would write something on the guitar because I felt like if I didn't have that release, I would explode. So I would spend the day at the hospital and then come back to my house and try to try to try to try to translated musically. With no real clear intention of what I was trying to achieve, I was just

finding these chords and progressions that mirrored the way that I felt. Okay, let me play this first voice memo, Yusufi. I'm just wandering around a fretboard trying to find some sort of progression that makes sense. And there's something about that progression that seems like a journey in a way. This verse and this chorus riff is a good example of where I was mentally. You know, I was confused and I was conflicted and I was lost. That first section I wrote at a time where I was going to visit her every day in the hospital. The B section I wrote not long after she passed. This voice note in particular, I think I was on a couch in Hawaii.

I got a capo, something that I've really never played with before. What I found was a whole new world of suspended notes that were doubled and would hang over the riff. Again, I found this progression that resonated with me emotionally. I hadn't considered putting that A section and the B section together yet. We hadn't started recording. We hadn't started working on an album. I was just kind of banking all of these ideas. But whenever I prepare songs for an album,

it usually begins with some sort of demo process that I do on my own just to make sure that I'm not crazy. Like, this riff sounds cool on an acoustic guitar. I wonder what it would sound like if I put another guitar and drums to it. When you're making a demo, do you try and play drums along to what you've already done on guitar,

or are you actively trying to come up with something in contrast to that part? It's interesting that you say that because in the second demo, I really wasn't sure what I was doing. All I remembered was how I strum that riff. Usually when I go in to do a demo on my own,

I'm not thinking much about what I'm going to do on the drums. I'll just start playing. But I do like the way that the drums just kind of rolled down the track as these other things happened around it. If it's a big riff, there's accents that I do want to land. But real magic can happen. and when you lose all of those preconceived ideas and just kind of play along.

Like if you get towards the end of that B section, when it gets into the... The time signature is sort of strange. As Dave was explaining this part of the song to me, he started illustrating it with some really intense hands-on-nees drumming. It was pretty awesome. Then I think like, oh shit, I wonder if I could do like a cool Tom thing, right? So then I start going fucking...

And as I'm doing it, I'm like, I'm off the riff right now. I have no idea where I am. I'm just doing this crazy thing. But as I listened back, I'm like, oh, fuck. I actually stayed in the riff. I got lucky and they fucking lined up. So with these two demos, these two ideas were separate to me

until I imagined if I were to put these two things together, this song is more than just a three or four minute song. Maybe it's something much bigger. And I could have a piece of music, unlike anything that we've ever done, and I could dedicate it to my mother. What was your mom's relationship like to your music? You know, as I was sitting with my mother in her final days, we'd watch tennis and drink coffee.

and I would strum a guitar and play guitar to her all day long. I was working on a riff the whole time, and it was coming into shape each day until, I think it might have been the day before she passed. I said to her, I've been writing this. It's a song on our new record called Show Me How, and it's a really beautiful kind of melancholy riff. I played the riff to her and sang the vocal melody.

I said, what do you think? And she looked at me and she was like, but with this song, I don't know how to explain it other than to say that she was the most important person in my entire life. So I thought this has to be the most important music I've ever made. And that's when the teacher started to take shape. My mother was a public school teacher for 35 years. I was raised in Virginia outside of Washington, D.C. My parents divorced when I was, I think, five or six years old.

And I was raised single-handedly by my public school teacher mother. I truly believe that teachers are teachers from birth. You were put onto this earth to do maybe the most altruistic. challenging thing, putting someone else ahead of yourself in order for them to progress. I was the worst student. I hated it when she tried to tutor me. I don't want to hear that teacher voice, you know. But there was one show where the food fighters were opening for the red hot chili peppers,

and it was just 25 years ago. And they couldn't start the show because the audience had already rushed the barrier in the arena. and the promoter came out and said, we can't begin the show until you guys back up. Nobody listened to the promoter. Somebody else came out. No, seriously, you guys, you need to back up. You need to back up.

My mother took the microphone, went out there and said, listen, you kids, you need to back up. And everybody just backed the fuck up. That's amazing. So we recorded the whole thing here at our studio, 606. And then after a few weeks, we decided to go to Greg Kirsten, our producer's studio. And usually before we're making a record, I've shared ideas with the guys. But with this song, they hadn't heard one lick of music.

Really? No. I basically said, let me try something really quick. And I sat down and I played the entire A section off the top of my head. Just on drums. Just on drums. I finish, I walk into the control room, and everyone's looking at me kind of mystified. It was six minutes long and it had all these different sections, like, what the fuck was that?

I said, okay, hold on, give me a guitar. Let me show you how it goes. I think at first they were like, okay, Dave, whatever, dude, let's see what happens. But then as each member started playing with it, it just blossomed. Nate Mendel, our bassist, he's an unconventional bass player. He finds melodies within that riff. Pat Smear, our guitarist, he's the flamethrower. Chris Shifflett is a very methodical, nuanced player. He's an incredible player.

So by the end of the day, we had the shape of the song. musically and dynamically I thought this might be my favorite thing that we've ever done. Was it hard to figure out how you were going to approach the lyrics when you already had this very specific and complicated musical structure? I do think that sometimes you can get stuck in the rigid parameters of verse chorus, verse, bridge, that conventional structure. You know, don't Boris get to the chorus. I just decided this song is for me. It's not for the radio.

This song is for my mother. So I just kind of let it go. I imagined the arrangement of the song to be the experience from beginning to end. We were having all these guests, friends, family, come to the house and I knew what she was thinking she knew what I was thinking

and there'd be a knock at the door and I'd think who's at the door now and it would be someone we've known our entire life that line comes from a conversation that I had with my mother

when we brought her home from being in the hospital for weeks on end at one point she said hey I'm tired I want to go to sleep And I said, okay. And she said, well, if I go to sleep, where will I wake up?

I said, well, if you take a nap, you're just going to wake up right here. I didn't realize the nature of what she was asking me. And she kind of turned her head, smiled and side-eyed me, and then I knew what she meant. I said, I don't know, but I'll meet you there. Could you tell me about the wake-up lyrics? I think most people's immediate reaction to seeing someone dying is to wish for them to wake up. But that's not how it works. You were there in the actual moment.

One of my greatest fears in life was always that I would be gone when this happened. Like gone on the road? Gone on the road, just not present for this. And I was there, and we were there together. In the early demo that I did, I had some kind of cheesy melitron sound on the keyboard. But when we recorded the song at Greg Kirsten Studio, we had a string section come in,

and Greg conducted the section for that part. So the first half of the song is meant to sort of build, to some sort of crescendo going through the emotions of that experience. And then the second half of the song is reflection. You showed me how to breathe now. I showed me how to say goodbye. You showed me ought to be never showed me how to say goodbye. I wrote those lyrics the night before I had to go sing the song.

There aren't too many Food Fighters songs that are, one chord with a simple groove for bar after bar after bar. Any other song I'd ever written, I would probably just toss that and think, I would rather it be something that had more movement, or I wish that the chords would do something more interesting. But in that moment, I just relieved myself of any of those second guesses. I just thought, fuck it. That's what I mean, and that's what I'm going to say,

and that's how I'm going to sing it. You showed me how to breathe, never showed me how to say goodbye. We really built this song more so than any other Foo Fighters song we've ever recorded. And my favorite part of the song really is the end of the song. I imagined that the song would sort of collapse in on itself and deconstruct in this massive wash of noise. to me, this was the sound of life ending. Your final moments, I thought,

just become this distortion of everything you've ever experienced in your life. And then it just turns off. The funny thing is, I imagined that ending for the song because I imagined everything ending. but what I now realize is it doesn't. I don't believe that everything just stops. I truly believe that this is just some sort of transition. I was probably my only friend that enjoyed hanging out with their parent.

You know, she was cool. She was really good at being a mother, especially the challenge of being my. mother I can't even imagine hyperactive punk rock nightmare but we were best friends I felt like I needed to honor her or pay tribute to her or do justice with this piece of music so that's when it turned into something other than just a song it's the most important thing that I've ever written because I wrote it for such a gigantic reason. I was wondering how you felt about this, but a few years ago, my mom passed away.

I'm sorry. And I wrote a song about her. And, you know, there's this whole process of grief that you go through, and then you try and put it together in a song. But then there was like this extra little coda of grief for me, which is that I could never let her know that I did this thing for her. I don't believe that. I bet you could.

I bet she knows. Is that how you feel about your mom? Yes. And this song? Yeah. She's here. She knows. For sure.

How do you think she feels about it? About the song? Eh. Nice, David. Coming up, you'll hear how all these ideas and elements came together in the final song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length,

and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby,

Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band.

The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's The Teacher by Foo Fighters in its entirety. or visit SongExploder.net. You'll find links to buy or stream the teacher, and you can watch the music video. If you like this episode,

you might also like Metallica's episode from 2017. You'll find that one at songexploder.net slash Metallica. This episode was produced by Craig Ely, Theo Balcom, Kathleen Smith, Mary Dolan, and me. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radio Tocelter, from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on social media at Rishi Hurway, and you can follow the show at SongExploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. This is the end of our 10th year of Song Exploder. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you.