Everybody now thinks that Nashville is the coolest city in America.
Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it's just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.
When Nirvana became popular, you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors - old friends, family.
The word ‘grunge’ became a household term, and fashion runways were filled with flannel shirts and long underwear. Oh, how we laughed… Every now and then when I’m feeling a little nostalgic, I put on my ‘grunge tuxedo’ - flannel shirt, long shorts with long underwear underneath them, and a pair of Doc Martens - and dance around the house to Tad records.
I love Black Sabbath. They made an amazing contribution to music today. Almost every band that made it big in the Nineties owed a debt to them.
I've always been a fan of melody and emotional melancholy, whether it was Rites of Spring or Tears for Fears or Neil Young. If I hear a song that has a sweet melody, I'm a sucker for it, whether it's Linkin Park or Little Richard.
When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It's inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.
I mean, I never liked being told what to do. It's one of the reasons I dropped out of school.
It's funny; recently I've started to notice people's impersonations of me, and it's basically like a hyperactive child.
I'm not like a voracious hoarder who has 50,000 albums of vinyl stacked in a storage space in the San Fernando Valley. But I do have albums from the last 40 years of my life.
And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I'd go back to Virginia.
The whole slacker generation totally didn't apply to us musically.
Being in Nirvana was amazing an experience that will never happen again for me. And I look on them as some of the best and worst times of my life. But we're in this band, the Foo Fighters, making music for the love of music. We all came from bands that had disbanded, and we were drawn to each other because we missed playing - we missed getting in the van, loading our equipment, and watching it break down in the middle of a show. And that feeling hasn't gone away. There's nothing I'd rather do than make music. It's the love of my life.
If you were to sit me down in a classroom, with fluorescent lights humming and some woman trying to teach me Italian, there's no way. But scream goes to Italy, we stay in a squat, and the only way you can ask someone where to take a piss is to do it in Italian. So I learned Italian.
There's nothing better than having a bottle of beer in your hand in the waves.
Dude, maybe not everyone loves 'Glee.' Me included. I watched 10 minutes and it wasn't my thing.
You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap - and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and 'Heart Shaped Box' and stuff on 'In Utero' just happened that way.
After 10 years, I have been touring for 20, playing basically the same type of music, a four-piece or three-piece type of music with loud, crashing drums and screaming vocals. It gets to the point where you're looking for something new, and you don't want to do something that's way too left-field, for fear that it might seem contrived.
To women, drummers seem like these adorable, sexy Neanderthals, and lead singers seem mysterious and dangerous. So while the lead singers all want to be David Bowie, floating into parties and being the center of attention, it's the drummers who are in the corner doing keg stands and breaking tables. Usually it's the drummers who get the fun-loving ladies and the singers who get the nutcases.
We just do what we always do. We play shows and go home and rest and then play more shows.
Sharing music is not a crime. It shouldn't be. There should be a deeper meaning to making music than just selling downloads.
When I sit down to interview people, I don't hold questions and I don't know the answers. They're more like conversations that become lessons.
I'm not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.
I dropped out of high school and I couldn't go to college 'cause I wasn't smart enough, so I'd resigned myself to loading trucks and playing punk rock on the weekends.
I had a Super Grover doll growing up. Super Grover was very clumsy, he wasn't very good-looking. But in his own way he'd always save the day.
