Dave Grohl’s grand plans for Foo Fighters’ latest record has been put on hold, but he’s been busy exploring other creative avenues while waiting out the pandemic

I hear you’re also working on documentaries, a second book, and recently something with [AC/DC’s lead singer] Brian Johnson for television?

Yeah. The Brian Johnson thing was funny, because I’d been making a movie ‒ which we’ve finally finished ‒ called What Drives Us. It was originally about bands touring in vans, because that was the only option when you were starting out. But as I started interviewing different musicians, I realised that everyone shared the same experience, whether it’s the guys from Metallica or Guns N’ Roses or the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers. So, the movie shifted to explore why people throw their lives away to live in a shitty old van and share their music with the world.

I did an interview with Brian Johnson for my movie, and he did a separate interview with me for a project he was doing. And it’s funny, because I grew up worshiping him as a hero, but when two musicians sit down and really start talking about their lives and their careers, they usually turn out to be the same, you know? You fall in love with Rock and Roll, so you learn an instrument, start a band with friends, move on to playing in a pub, and eventually get in a van to go to the next place. All that aside, it’s been fun to be able to stretch out and do other projects that we never really had the time for.

The new album must be old news for you in many ways, since it was finished in February 2020.

Our drummer Taylor Hawkins calls it our old new record. We started recording about a year ago, but I was already writing material and recording demos around six months before that. It’s funny, because we finished it but stepped away from it when everything stopped, then got back together in the last few months for rehearsals and kind of fell in love with them again. The lyrics were written long before any pandemic outbreak or changes in the political climate, but when I listen to the record now, they still apply, and maybe even more so.

It’s a danceable record in a way, and maybe the most pop-y one the Foo Fighters have ever made, isn´t it?

Yeah, no question. We’ve had a wide range of sounds and feels over the years, from the acoustic stuff to the noisy stuff, and there’s still this really wide range of references to fall back on ‒ if we want to. But we’ve never made the “party record”, and some of my favourite albums from the 1980s were by rock bands that were making danceable songs, whether it was The Power Station, David Bowie or even The Rolling Stones. As a drummer, it’s important for me to push