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 Rishikesh Hirway. 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 Fighters song, The Teacher, which is an epic ten-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 2022. 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.
What's the great fortune for our world? Where will I wake up? Where will I wake up? 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, 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 translate it 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 you this first voice memo you sent me.
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. And 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 strumed 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 when you lose all of those preconceived ideas and just kind of play along. Like, if you get to the end of that B section, when it gets into the... The time signature sort of strange. As Dave was explaining this part of the song to me, he started illustrating it with some really intense hands-on knees 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 off the riff right now. I have no idea where I am. I'm just doing this crazy thing. But as I listen 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, yeah. But with this song, I don't know, I'm not explaining 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're 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 and 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 serious. So 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 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 finished, I walked 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. Made Mendel our bassist, he's an unconventional bass player. He finds melodies within that riff. Pat Smirr, our guitarist, he's the flamethrower.
Krishit Flick 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. Music, 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 bore us get to the chorus. I just decided this song is for me. It's not for the radio. The song is for my mother. So I just kind of let it go. I imagine the arrangement of the song to be the experience from beginning to end. Who's at the don't know? Who's at the don't know? 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.
I would be a knock at the door, and I think I was at the door now. And it would be someone we've known our entire life. We can, what's a plan for tomorrow. Where will I wake up? Where will I wake up? 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 inside at me. And then I knew what she meant. I said, I don't know, but I'll meet you there. I'll wake up. 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 like on the road? Gone on the road. Just not present for this. And I was there. And we were there together. Wake up. Wake up. In the early demo that I did, I had some kind of cheesy melaton sound on the keyboard.
But when we recorded the song at Greg Kirsten's 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 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, 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 fighter 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.
You showed me how to breathe, never showed me how to say goodbye. We really built this song more so than any other food fighter 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's cool.
She was really good at being a mother. Especially the challenge of being my mother, I can't even imagine a 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. And I wrote a song better. 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 there a real feel about your mom? Yes. And the song? Yeah. She's here. She knows. For sure. Yeah. How do you think she feels about it? How about the song? That's nice David. Coming up, you'll hear how all these ideas and elements came together in the final song.
From Wondry and Dr. Sus comes Tis the Grinch Holiday Podcast. Listen every week as the Grinch hosted by Saturday Night Lives James Austin Johnson, goes hilarious celebrity guests as they try to get the Grinch to turn his sour Grinchy frown upside down. Will they succeed or will he grill them like chestnuts on an open fire? Follow Tis the Grinch Holiday Podcast on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Song Exploder is sponsored by Distro Kid. If you're an independent artist, Distro Kid is a great way to get your music distributed. You get unlimited uploads and you get to keep 100% of your royalties and earnings. There are more than a million artists, including me who've used Distro Kid to get their music into all the major streaming services. Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, everywhere.
The Distro Kid app is now available on iOS and Android. Go to the app or Play Store to download it now. And for 10% off your first year's membership, go to distrokid.com slash VIP slash song exploder. And now here's the teacher by Food Fighters in its entirety. Son goes down and goes wide. One step closer than he ever sang. I can feel what others do. Can't stop this if I want to. I can't stop this if I want to. I can't stop this if I want to. I can't stop this if I want to.
I can't stop this if I want to. Where will I wake up? Where will I wake up? Where will I wake up? Where will I wake up? Where will I wake up? Do the dough now, where will I wake up? Where will he wake up? Where he's gone Where he's gone Where he's gone Where he's gone Where he's gone Where he's gone Where he's gone Two gold stones on a riverbed With tents on cannot man All white candles on a dusty porch One flame down another burn Hey kid, what's the plan for tomorrow? Where will I wake up?
Where will I wake up? Where will I wake up? Who's at the door now? You show me how to breathe And I show me how to say goodbye You show me how to beat and I show me how to say goodbye Every page turns its lesson learned and time You show me how to breathe And I show me how to say goodbye Try to make good with the air that's left Count me living in an even breath
My breath by breath by breath by breath by breath Count me living in an even breath by breath by breath Count me living in an even breath by breath I'm going to be there I'm going to be there I'm going to be there Show me how to beat and I show me how to say goodbye You show me how to breathe
And I show me how to say goodbye Every page turns its lesson learned and time You show me how to beat and I show me how to say goodbye Try to make good with the air that's left Count me living in an even breath by breath by breath Try to make good with the air that's left
Count me living in an even breath by breath by breath by breath by breath Count me living in an even breath by breath Count me living in an even breath by breath by breath by breath Count me living in an even breath by breath by breath Count me living in an even breath by breath by breath
Count me living in an even breath by breath Count me living in an even breath by breath To learn more, visit www.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 www.songexploder.net.net This episode was produced by Craig Ealy, Theo Balcom, Kathleen Smith, Mary Dolan, and me The episode artwork is by Carlos Slerma and I made the show's theme music and logo Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts You can learn more about our shows at www.radiotopia.fm You can follow me on social media at RishiHurway and you can follow the show at SongExploder
You can also get a SongExploder t-shirt at www.songexploder.net.slashshirt This is the end of our 10th year of SongExploder. I'm Rishi K.Hurway. Thank you so much for listening Radiotopia from PRX