Ep. 11 | Foo Fighters - The Colour and the Shape

Beyond The Beat

When you hear Dave Grohl's name today, the first thing that might pop into your head might be rock star, or success, or incredible songwriter, or confidence. The reality is, his life had to fall apart in some sense before he could realize all of those traits. As the saying goes, when it seems your life is falling apart, it may actually be falling into place.

The Colour and the Shape has been described as by Dave as a therapy album. The band went into the recording process unsure of how they would gel. And the weight of Dave's divorce hung particularly heavy over the album, even though he didn't realize the full extent of it until he and producer Gil Norton began sequencing the album's running order. Once they finally sequenced the songs, it ran like a therapy session. One man's quest to make sense of the world crumbling beneath his feet. The opening track "Doll" has Dave whispering "In all of the time that we've shared, I've never been so scared." From this point on it desends into a free-fall; Dave dealing with love and obsession, insecurity and betrayal, childhood dreams and adult responsibilities. And throughout it, he flirts with rage.

By the end Dave finds confidence and realizes he can make it though life's trials and tribulations. In "New Way Home", the album's closer, he repeats the phrase, "I'm not scared." Whatever Dave was scared about when the album started has been resolved, as he'd say after the album was released, "I go through this whole therapy session and I end up at the last track when I realize that it's ok, I can make my way through all of this and I'm not that freaked out at the end. We we were joking for awhile when we were thinking about artwork for the album I thought 'Why don't we get a picture of a therapists couch on it.' For the rest of my life, when I listen to this record, it will be the fall of 1996 and my journal entries, which is a little strange."

While the Foo Fighters self-titled debut was more of an experimental Dave solo project, The Colour and the Shape proved to the world Dave could bring a group together to be a full-fledged rock-band. It debuted the Foo Fighters as an American rock group that would be a major presence over the next two decades and immediately dismissed skepticism over the band as a flighty over-ambitious second act for Dave. But maybe more importantly, The Colour and the Shape gave us Everlong...one of the best damn rock songs ever made.