Usually, putting out a solo album is an all-consuming endeavor for a musician—but for Chris Shiflett, it’s just one of a dizzying number of projects he’s doing lately. Not that the celebrated Foo Fighters guitarist deliberately arranged it that way, though: “You try from a distance to plan things so that you’re not doing all the stuff all at once, and, oh boy, did my planning fail miserably on this one!” he tells American Songwriter with a laugh during a recent Zoom video call.
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He lists the things that are all happening at once: He’s released his latest solo album, Lost at Sea, on October 20, and has been playing shows to support it. In June, Foo Fighters put out a new album, But Here We Are, which has led to playing shows worldwide—and, in fact, he got back from South America just before this interview. On top of all that, he’s hosting a brand-new guitar-focused video podcast, Shred with Shifty, that launched over the summer.
Despite his claims of being overextended and jet-lagged, Shiflett is upbeat as he talks about his solo album. “Making this record was really different than any other record I’ve made,” he says. “Normally, you set aside two or three weeks or a month, and you just bang it out all at once. But this one, when we started, we weren’t even thinking about making a record.”
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He began writing these songs during the COVID-induced lockdowns, then made some demos at his home studio in L.A. He also did some co-writes with friends over Zoom. Finally, in the spring of 2021, he flew to Nashville to record a couple of songs, enlisting the Cadillac Three’s frontman Jaren Johnston as the producer. Those sessions turned out so well that Shiflett realized he wanted to turn this into a full-fledged album, instead of releasing the songs as a series of standalone singles like he’d originally envisioned.
Though both Shiflett and Johnston then resumed touring with their respective bands, they worked on Lost at Sea whenever they could. “Over the course of that year, I went back out to Nashville a couple more times and recorded more songs, and eventually we had a whole album,” Shiflett says. “We were recording the basic tracks, and maybe get like the lead vocal done, so there was a lot of stuff to tweak. I would take the file back to L.A. and I’d add stuff to it and change stuff and send it to Jaren. Then he would add stuff and tweak stuff. It took probably like a year or so before we got everything done. It was a really interesting way to make a record.”
The only exception to this burst of all-new material was the track “Damage Control,” which Shiflett had actually started writing fifteen years before. “It was just an old demo that I had kind of forgotten about, and then in having a conversation with Jaren, he said something like, ‘It’d be cool to get something that feels kind of like The Clash.’ And I thought, ‘I’ve got an old demo that’s kind of got those old Clash-y stab chords,’ and went and dug that up and sent it to him, and that’s how we wound up recording that,” Shiflett says.
Perhaps as a result of creating so much of this album in Nashville, Lost at Sea has a distinctly Americana vibe, though Shiflett admits that he can’t completely embrace that label. “I play guitar music, and guitar music generally gets referred to as Americana nowadays, especially if it’s got a little bit of country in there,” he says, “whereas in the ’90s, I’d never even heard the term Americana; it was all called ‘alt-country.’ And alt-country was like the Stones meets country music. Now it just seems like Americana is a much broader term. It could be something that’s jazzy. It could be something that’s classic R&B. It could be outlaw-country. It could be all these different things, yet under that genre.”
In fact, he says he didn’t think about what genre he wanted for this album at all: “I just write what comes out of me. And what comes out of me tends to be a reflection of the music that I listen to. I’m 52 years old, so I’ve been listening to music for a long time, so there’s a wide range of influences there.”
Growing up in Santa Barbara, California, Shiflett listened to Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. He also admired his older brothers, who were similarly music-obsessed and who played instruments. As a teenager, he started playing in bands, covering Kiss songs. There was, he says, no question that he was going to try to do this for his career.
“There was never anything else that I thought was as cool,” Shiflett says. “I wanted to be a full-time musician, [but] I didn’t really understand what that meant. When you’re a kid, how do you know? You just see videos on MTV—you go, ‘I want to do that, that looks fucking great!’”
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By the mid-1990s, Shiflett was living in San Francisco and playing in the punk rock band No Use for a Name, “and my idea of being a full-time musician was very different at that point because I was doing it—and it wasn’t Lamborghinis and champagne and all the things that you think it’s going to be when you’re a little kid,” he says with a laugh. Even so, the two albums he recorded with No Use for a Name gave him his first taste of widespread success.
By the time Shiflett was 28 years old, though, it seemed like maybe his music career was ending. “I was beginning to feel like maybe things had run their course—and I was happy,” he says. “I was like, ‘This it’s great—I got to make a bunch of records and do this thing.’ Then the opportunity came up to play in Foo Fighters—that was mind-blowing, completely; I did not expect that that was going to happen.” He has been a member of Foo Fighters for more than 20 years now.
Even as he ascended through the ranks, though, Shiflett admits that it took him quite a while to become an adept songwriter. “I tried my hand at writing some songs when I was a teenager playing in high school bands, and they were just so bad, and I had no confidence,” he says. “When you’re a kid, you’re writing about stuff you don’t know anything about. I was trying to write about adult ideas I just hadn’t lived through. Then there was a period in my early adult life where I wasn’t even really attempting to write. I would always have little ideas, but I would never really put them together into songs.
“It wasn’t until my late twenties that I really started to develop the discipline of sitting down [and saying], ‘OK, here’s this idea I have,’ write out some lyrics and try to come up with a vocal melody,” he continues. “Probably the turning point for me [was], I had a band years ago called Jackson United, and I remember when I wrote a song called ‘All the Way.’ That was the first time I ever wrote something and had a complete lyrical idea, and could sit down and play it and go, ‘I have a song here.’ And it was the first time I had ever played one of my ideas for other people and they were like, ‘Hey, I like that song!’”
These days, Shiflett is highly respected for his songwriting, though he says he keeps that in perspective: “Certainly, [for] Foo Fighters, people’s expectations are high. For my solo stuff, people’s expectations are low—which gives you this great freedom. There’s no, ‘We need another record by October!’ It just kind of ticks along, and you do it when you have the time to do it, and when you feel inspired to do it. It has to be fun. It has to be a great experience with people I want to be around and people I want to play with because there just aren’t that many hours in the day.”
As for his specific songwriting process, “I just write whatever comes out of me,” he says, “and then go back and think, ‘OK, what am I trying to say here? What are the important bits? What can I cross out here?’ And make some shit rhyme. I tend to write things that are a reflection of my life, and then embellish it a little to make it have sort of a narrative to it. In some sense, it’s a mystery every time.”
He admits that he can still find it challenging, too. “You don’t want to write the same shit over and over—and it’s hard not to, because really, in most people’s lives, there’s what really matters,” he says. “You’re always kind of dealing with heartache and stress. If you’re of a certain age, you’re raising a family and you’ve got work and you’ve got all the anxiety that goes along with all those things. Those are the common threads, for most of us.”
To spark new ideas, Shiflett likes co-writing because then everyone involved is “bringing their life into it, with their reference points, which are always going to be different. That makes for some of the more interesting lyrics, to me. You get pulled out of your comfort zone. There’s a compromise in songwriting with other people, so if you can get through that and be comfortable with it and get somewhere, that’s better than what you would have come up with on your own.”
Regardless of whether you’re writing with others or independently, Shiflett feels it’s important not to labor over a song too much. “There’s something in the magic, I think, of doing it when the inspiration hits. Instead of recording thirty seconds of it on my iPhone and trying to come back to it six months later, [I’ll think] ‘I’ll just woodshed the whole thing right now.’ There’s something in that inspiration. You can always tweak it and edit it and change it later.”
And even though he’s indisputably proven his skills as a musician and a songwriter, Shiflett believes he will continue to evolve and refine his craft. “It never stops—you always keep changing,” he says. “One year you’re listening to a lot of this, and five years later you’re listening to something totally different, and it all kind of rubs off. I feel like the longer you’re in it, the more those influences shine through.”
