Is there any bigger star in rock music today than Dave Grohl?
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The former Nirvana drummer-turned-Foo Fighters frontman is a New York Times Best-Selling author, a favorite of drum prodigy Nandi Bushell, and one of the most recognizable people in popular music, who has drummed with Animal from the Muppets and Kurt Cobain. What else is there?
Well, there might be learning what Grohl has to say about the world at large outside of music. What might be his thoughts when it comes to life, love, and the craft of music? Well, that’s exactly the subject of this inquiry here.
So, without further ado, let’s dive into the Top 22 Dave Grohl Quotes.
1. “Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.”
2. “If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s gathering people together to do something fun.”
3. “It was that famous joke: What’s the last thing the drummer said before he got kicked out of the band? ‘Hey, I wrote a song.'”
4. “When there’s so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you’ve already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days?”
5. “There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.”
6. “A lot of the records you buy, there’s nothing you can hold in your hand, it’s all 1’s and 0’s, this digital cloud floating in the ether. but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand.”
7. “My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.”
8. “Cause when you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.”
9. “You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I’ve never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.”
10. “Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument – learning to do your craft—that’s the most important thing! It’s not about what goes on in a computer!”
11. “I’m so not macho. It’s crazy. My man cave is so not a man cave.”
12. “Because you have things like ‘American Idol’ and you’ve got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it’s easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.”
13. “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.”
14. “There’s always gonna be rock n’ roll bands, there’s always gonna be kids that love rock n’ roll records, and there will always be rock n’ roll.”
15. “My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.”
16. “I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.”
17. “When you’re recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can’t necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.”
18. “It’s tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I’m wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.”
19. “When I listen to the radio, I just hear so much music that doesn’t even sound like people. The vocals are all tuned, and the drums are all fake.”
20. “Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.”
21. “I can understand how some people might resent me for having the audacity to continue playing music, but it’d take a lot more than that to stop me from doing it. I started Foo Fighters because I didn’t want to retreat.”
22. “It’s funny; recently I’ve started to notice people’s impersonations of me, and it’s basically like a hyperactive child.”
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