Foo Fighters released Sonic Highways on November 10, 2014, through Roswell/RCA. Their eighth studio album put an unusual demand on Dave Grohl: write lyrics shaped by the people he interviewed for an HBO documentary series. Produced by Butch Vig and the band, the eight-track record connected a new Foo Fighters song to each stop in an exploration of American music scenes.
The music had a substantial head start. Bassist Nate Mendel told Rolling Stone Australia in 2014 that the band spent about six months rehearsing the songs before recording. They settled into a pattern of a week away working and a week back home preparing for the next session. For Mendel, the point of that practice was being able to concentrate on feel without having to think through every approaching change. That groundwork mattered when they reached Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio in Chicago to record the opening track, “Something From Nothing.”
Vig recalled in a 2022 Modern Drummer interview that the song’s changes presented a particular challenge for Taylor Hawkins. It moved through different grooves before reaching its big floor-tom finish, and the producer was prepared to assemble a performance from separate sections. Hawkins wanted to play it all the way through. He got the drum performance on the first take, then listened back with a grin. It was a practical payoff for the band’s preparation: a complicated arrangement could be captured as a continuous performance.
Grohl was setting himself a different test. At a 2014 Television Critics Association event, in remarks reported by Showbiz Junkies, he explained how making music documentaries had changed his thinking. Filming the band and directing Sound City had shown him how much the stories behind a recording could add to a listener’s connection with it. The new project made those stories part of the writing itself. On the last day of a session, Grohl would take interview transcripts back to his hotel room. He worked through them for words, ideas and experiences that could fit the song’s existing outline. “I write the song from the episode,” he explained. Each installment ended with a performance, allowing viewers to recognize references to people and stories they had just encountered. The lyric sheet and the documentary were being built from the same conversations.
The Washington, D.C., chapter also took Grohl back to music that had shaped him. “The Feast and the Famine” was recorded at Inner Ear in Arlington, Virginia, a studio he associated with the local punk records of his youth. That connection gave the project a personal stake: he was using the band’s recording sessions to introduce listeners to the communities and working spaces behind the music he loved.
The schedule left its mark on the finished album, too. Mendel felt the workload reduced the opportunity to revisit every detail, leaving the record looser than some of its predecessors. He had initially doubted the plan to build lyrics from interviews. By the time the album was finished, that approach had become his favorite part of the project. As he put it in the same 2014 interview, “This is more about telling stories and taking a larger perspective.”
