Foo Fighter

Foo Fighters From: In Your Honor, 2005

Even the best songwriters can get it wrong. As with a song Dave Grohl wrote, which they recorded then shelved because “we didn’t think it was any good”.

Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins was having a cigarette with Rush drummer Neil Peart when he heard that Prince was covering one of his band’s songs. It was February 2007, and Hawkins was hanging with the Canadian band in the recording studio. One of the studio TVs was showing that year’s Super Bowl half-time show, featuring Prince as the main attraction. He played a handful of his hits before launching into electrifying covers of Dylan’s (via Hendrix) All Along The Watchtower, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary and the Foos’ Best Of You.

“I’m outside, smoking with Neil, when somebody sticks their head out and goes: ‘Uh, dude, Prince is doing your song,’” Hawkins later told MTV. Hawkins ducked back inside to check that it wasn’t a wind-up. “It was pretty amazing to have Prince cover one of our songs – actually doing it better than we did.”

Prince’s performance was stellar, but whether it outstripped the original was debatable. Few modern rock artists can deliver an anthem like the Foo Fighters, and no Foo Fighters anthem is as big, bold and blockbusting as Best Of You, an accidental hit that became a beacon of positivity in turbulent times.

But it almost never happened. Following the turmoil of 2002’s troubled One By One album, the Foos had regained their confidence to the point where they had enough material for a double album. Best Of You was one of the songs Grohl brought to the table.

“I wrote that song in my garage,” he recalled. “I used to smoke cigarettes there cos I couldn’t smoke them in the house. I had a little welcome mat that said: ‘Go away.’”

For the song’s lyrics, Grohl had been inspired by his time on the campaign trail with Democractic Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. “I was playing acoustically at his rallies, so I started writing all these songs about breaking away from the things that confine you,” he explained later.

Still, Grohl was unenthusiastic about the song. “We recorded it and shelved it,” he says. “We didn’t think it was any good.”

So far, so blasé. But when the band listened back to the album – which would eventually be released as In Your Honor – they realised they were missing a stadium-sized song.

“We thought, ‘We haven’t got anything,’” said Hawkins. “Then our manager came to the studio and said, ‘What’s that song that says ‘the best of you’ a hundred times?”

Their manager, Jon Silva, was exaggerating, but not by much – in the finished version of Best Of You the chorus repeated more than 40 times. But his point – “Just pound it in their head,” according to Hawkins – was on the money.

Released as a single in May 2005, Best Of You gave the Foo Fighters their biggest ever hit in the UK and US. The finished version encapsulated everything that was great about the Foos, from the way the cautious verses suddenly blossomed into monster-sized choruses, to the throatshredding intensity of Grohl’s vocals. And its central message of positivity in the face of adversity chimed hard in the post-9/11 era.

Prince’s Super Bowl cover two years later rubber-stamped this once-unloved song as one of the great rock anthems of the 21st century, proving that sometimes even the biggest of names can get it wrong.

“We recorded Best Of You and shelved

it. We didn’t think it was any good.”

BLACKBIRD

Alter Bridge From: Blackbird, 2007

“A s songwriters, those are the moments you dream of,” Alter Bridge frontman Myles Kennedy has said of the moment he and guitarist Mark Tremonti first listened back to the finished Blackbird – the millennial generation’s brooding, muscular answer to Stairway To Heaven.

Their epic anthem, the eight-minute title track of their second album, saw the Florida band emerge from a period of strife with a massive statement of intent. By 2006, relations with their then label WindUp Records had soured to the extent that the band wanted out. There followed a protracted and bitter legal struggle, which was resolved only when Alter Bridge opted to buy themselves out of their contract. It was a risky move, not to mention financially crippling, but one they were prepared to take.

“We just wanted to persevere,” drummer Scott Phillips says. “After we recorded One Day Remains [their debut album], Myles started playing guitar and found his comfort zone. That’s when we felt we had the best stuff ahead of us. We were in a really bad situation, but it was that need to press through. I don’t think we had any Plan B, it was all or nothing.”

Universal Republic snapped up the band for 2007’s Blackbird, an album that fully heralded the arrival of the Alter Bridge sound.

“It was pretty demoralising for a time. Everything seemed to be against us,” Kennedy confirms. “The record company was stalling us. There was a lot of stuff going on in our personal lives that needed dealing with.”

The “stuff” that was going on included the death of one of Kennedy’s very close friends just prior to the recording of Blackbird. It was this grief that would fuel the album’s title track and centrepiece, a buzzing masterwork that alternated between roaring metal and plaintive acoustics, the band interweaving new textures and tones, Phillips and bassist Brian Marshall proving themselves a formidable rhythm section, providing both melody and rare finesse.

“It’s a pretty dark song, but it’s also one I’m so very proud of,” says Kennedy. “We all felt it was one of the most challenging yet gratifying songs we’ve ever written. It was inspired by a friend of mine who passed away just as we were finishing it. In essence, the song is a story about the struggle to move on to a better place. It was my dearest wish for him to finally find peace.”

Such were the searing back-to-back licks of Tremonti and Kennedy, meanwhile, that Guitarist magazine later voted the song – ahead of Hendrix, Page, Van Halen and others – as having the greatest guitar solo of all time.

“I knew that solo was the last one I had organised for the record,” guitarist Mark Tremonti says of the dual threat instrumental break. “I put a ton of pressure on myself for that one because as a band we felt that was the strongest song on the album. I saved it until the end and made sure it was right. I put everything that I could into that solo. When me and Myles went back-to-back having our different styles I think it just worked. It adds depth. One guy soloing can use different vibes and feels but it is more apparent when you have two different players with different styles and influences playing together.”

“A lot of times I just improvise – I never know what I’m doing until I’m in the studio,” adds Kennedy. “But this time I really felt like I wanted to go into it with a gameplan. I remember sitting in my bedroom and essentially trying to play what I was singing in my head, piecing it together. And so I came up with this melodic approach to the first guitar solo, before Mark comes in and really starts blazing at the end.”

“I think we were trying to be safe with the first record,” says Tremonti. “So with Blackbird our main goal was to make this band sound completely different.” And they did.