The Foo Fighters’ next album is in motion, but don’t expect to pry too many details from the lips of drummer Taylor Hawkins.
“We’re getting started,” Hawkins tells Billboard about the follow-up to 2011’s “Wasting Light,” the Foos’ second consecutive No. 1 debut on the Billboard 200. “We’re getting our ideas together. Dave (Grohl) has his brain working overtime, like usual, and he’s got a lot of great ideas, both musically and conceptually — none that I can speak of at this moment, but it’s gonna be great. It’s gonna be cool.”
During this year’s South By Southwest Music + Media Conference, Grohl — who was in Austin, Texas with his Sound City Players and “Sound City: Real To Real” documentary — said that he has “a crazy idea of what I want to do with the next record and how we record it…It won’t be a conventional record.” And Hawkins says the Foos feel a collective pressure for the next effort to be as noteworthy as its predecessors.
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“Absolutely. You always want every one of them to be the best one you’ve ever done, and you always think you haven’t done your best one,” Hawkins acknowledges. “Although some people may feel we have, I still think we haven’t written our ‘Hotel California’ or our ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or whatever. You should always be a little scared…Every time you start a record, you have to be, like, ready to fuckin’ kill yourself or it’s not gonna be any good.”
Concurrent with the Foos activity, Hawkins is playing the occasional show with his hard rock covers band Chevy Metal — “We’re like the fuckin’ shittiest heavy metal wedding band of all time,” he notes — and would like to do some sort of side project, either with his group Coattail Riders or with some other entity.
“I’ve been trying to find a chance to do something like that,” Hawkins says. “I’ve got a bunch of demos for songs. Everybody else in Foo Fighters is a lot better at multi-tasking; the only way I can start a Coattail record or a Taylor record or whatever it is, it just kind of has to happen and get rolling and I have to get halfway done with and go, ‘Oh, I guess we’re doing this…’ I’m not good at going, ‘OK, we’re gonna do this at this time and I need to sit down and work on these songs’ and dah, dah, dah. I’m not like that — which would explain my grade point average in high school. That’s why I’m a rock ‘n’ roll musician, for sure.”