Foo Fighters - The Teacher

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This episode contains explicit language.

For the last episode of the year, I got the chance to drive up to Northridge, California, and have a conversation with Dave Grohl.

We talked about the Foo Fighter song, The Teacher, which is an epic, 10-minute-long long track.

Dave told me it's the most important piece of music he's ever written because it's dedicated to his mother, Virginia, who passed away in 2022.

Dave Grohl started Foo Fighters in 1994 after Nirvana ended.

This year, Foo Fighters set a record for having the most top 10 hits on the Billboard mainstream rock charts.

They've won 15 Grammy Awards, including winning the Grammy for Best Rock Album five times, more than anyone else.

The Teacher is from their 11th album, But Here We Are, which came out in June 2023.

I sat with Dave in the Foo Fighters practice space and he told me the whole story of the song.

Coming up, you'll hear the two voice memos he originally recorded on acoustic guitar, plus the two demos he made on his way to figuring the song out.

Where will I wake up?

Take it.

What's the print for tomorrow?

Where will I wake up?

Where will I wake up?

My name is Dave Grohl.

Last year, I went through a period of really deep mourning because

I lost two very important people in my life.

One is Taylor Hawkins, our drummer.

The other was my mother.

She passed in July of 2022.

And I was with her for all of the time leading up until her passing.

Every day during that period, I would write something on the guitar because I felt like if I didn't have that release, I would explode.

So I would spend the day at the hospital and then come back to my house and try to translate it musically with no real clear intention of what I was trying to achieve.

I was just finding these chords and progressions

that mirrored the way that I felt.

Okay, let me play you this first voice memo you sent me.

I'm just wandering around a fretboard trying to find some sort of progression that makes sense.

And there's something about that progression that seems like a journey in a way.

This verse and this chorus riff

is a good example of where I was mentally,

you know, I was confused and I was conflicted and I was

lost.

That first section I wrote

at a time where I was going to visit her every day in the hospital.

The B section I wrote not long after she passed.

This voice note in particular, I think I was on a couch in Hawaii.

I got a capo, something that I've really never played with before.

What I found was a whole new world of suspended notes that were doubled and would hang over the riff.

And again, I found this progression that resonated with me emotionally.

I hadn't considered putting that A section and the B section together yet.

We hadn't started recording.

recording, we hadn't started working on an album.

I was just kind of banking all of these ideas.

But whenever I prepare songs for an album, it usually begins with some sort of demo process that I do on my own just to make sure that I'm not crazy.

Like this riff sounds cool on an acoustic guitar.

I wonder what it would sound like if I put another guitar and drums to it.

When you're making a demo, do you try and play drums along to what you've already done on guitar?

Or are you actively trying to come up with something in contrast to that part?

It's interesting that you say that because

in the second demo,

I really wasn't sure what I was doing.

All I remembered was how I strummed that riff.

Usually when I go in to do a demo on my own, I'm not thinking much about what I'm going to do on the drums.

I'll just start playing.

But I do like the way that the drums just kind of rolled down the track as these other things happened around it.

If it's a big riff, there's accents that I do want to land.

But real magic can happen when you lose all of those preconceived ideas and just kind of play along.

Like if you get towards the end of that B section,

when it gets into the

time signature is sort of strange.

As Dave was explaining this part of the song to me, he started illustrating it with some really intense hands-on knees drumming.

It was pretty awesome.

Then I think, like, oh shit, I wonder if I could do like a cool Tom thing, right?

So then I start going fucking.

And as I'm doing it, I'm like, I'm off the riff right now.

I have no idea where I am.

I'm just doing this crazy thing.

But as I listen back, I'm like, oh, fuck.

I actually stayed in the riff.

I got lucky and they fucking lined up.

So with these two demos, these two ideas were separate to me until I imagined.

If I were to put these two things together, this song is more than just a three or four minute song.

Maybe it's something much bigger.

And I could have a piece of music unlike anything that we've ever done and I could dedicate it to my mother.

What was your mom's relationship like to your music?

You know, as I was sitting with my mother in her final days, We'd watch tennis and drink coffee and I would strum a guitar and play guitar to her all day long.

I was working on a riff the whole time, and it was coming into shape each day until I think it might have been the day before she passed.

I said to her, I've been writing this.

It's a song on our new record called Show Me How, and it's a really beautiful, kind of melancholy riff.

I played the riff to her and sang the vocal melody.

I said, What do you think?

And she looked at me and she was like, Yeah.

But

with this song, I don't know how to explain it other than to say that

she was the most important

person in my entire life.

So

I thought, this has to be the most important music I've ever made.

And that's when the teacher started to take shape.

My mother was a public school teacher for 35 years.

I was raised in Virginia outside of Washington, D.C.

My parents divorced when I was, I think, five or six years old.

And I was raised single-handedly by my public school teacher mother.

I truly believe that teachers are teachers from birth.

You were put onto this earth to do maybe the most altruistic, challenging thing, putting someone else ahead of yourself in order for them to progress.

I was the worst student.

I hated it when she tried to tutor me.

Just, I don't want to hear that teacher voice, you know.

But there was one show where the Foo Fighters were opening for the red hot chili peppers and this is 25 years ago.

And they couldn't start the show because the audience had already rushed the barrier in the arena.

And the promoter came out and said, We can't begin the show until you guys back up.

Nobody listened to the promoter.

Somebody else came out.

No, seriously, you guys, you need to back up.

You need to back up.

My mother took the microphone, went out there, and said, Listen, you kids, you need to back up.

And everybody just backed the fuck up.

That's amazing.

So we recorded the whole thing here at our studio 606.

And then after a few weeks, we decided to go to Greg Kirsten, our producer's studio.

And usually before we're making a record, I've shared ideas with the guys.

But with this song, they hadn't heard one lick of music.

Really?

No.

I basically said, let me try something really quick.

And I sat down and I played the entire A section off the top of my head.

Just on drums.

Just on drums.

I finish.

I walk into the control room and everyone's looking at me kind of mystified.

It was six minutes long and it had all these different sections.

Like, what the fuck was that?

I said, okay, hold on.

Give me a guitar.

Let me show you how it goes.

I think at first they were like, okay, Dave, whatever, dude, let's see what happens.

But then, as each member started playing with it, it just blossomed.

Nate Mendel, our bassist, he's an unconventional bass player.

He finds melodies within that riff.

Pat Smear,

our guitarist, he's the flamethrower.

Chris Schifflet

is a very methodical, nuanced player.

He's an incredible player.

So by the end of the day,

we had the shape of the song.

Musically and dynamically, I thought, this might be my favorite thing that we've ever done.

Was it hard to figure out how you were going to approach the lyrics when you already had this very specific and complicated musical structure?

I do think that sometimes

you can get stuck in the rigid parameters of verse, chorus, verse, bridge, that conventional structure.

You know, don't borrow, get to the chorus.

I just decided this song is for me.

It's not for the radio.

This song is for my mother.

So I just kind of let it go.

I imagine the arrangement of the song to be the experience from beginning to end.

Who's at the donor?

Who's at the donor?

We were having all these guests, friends, family come to the house.

And I knew what she was thinking.

She knew what I was thinking.

And there'd be a knock at the door and I'd think, oh who's at the door now

and it would be someone we've known our entire life

that line comes from a conversation that I had with my mother when we brought her home from being in the hospital for for weeks on end.

At one point, she said, hey, I'm tired.

I want to go to sleep.

And I said, okay.

And she said, well, if I go to sleep, where will I wake up?

I said, well, if you take a nap, you're just going to wake up right here.

I didn't realize the nature of what she was asking me.

And she kind of turned her head, smiled, and side-eyed me.

And then I knew what she meant.

I said, I I don't know, but I'll meet you there.

Who's in the don't now

wake up?

Could you tell me about the wake-up lyrics?

I think most people's immediate reaction to seeing someone dying

is to wish for them to wake up.

But

that's not how it works.

You were there in the actual moment.

One of my greatest fears in life

was always that I would be

gone

when this happened.

Like gone, like on the road.

Gone on the road, just not present for this.

And I was there and we were there together.

Wake up!

Wake up!

In the early demo that I did, I had some kind of cheesy mellotron sound on the keyboard.

But when we recorded the song at Greg Kirsten's studio, we had a string section come in and Greg conducted the section for that part.

So, the first half of the song is meant to sort of build to some sort of crescendo going through the emotions of that experience.

And then the second half of the song is reflection.

I wrote those lyrics the night before I had to go sing the song.

There aren't too many Foo Fighter songs that are one chord with a simple groove for bar after bar after bar.

Any other song I'd ever written, I would probably just toss that and think I would rather it be something that had more movement, or I wish that the chords would do something more interesting.

But in that moment, I just relieved myself of any of those second guesses.

I just thought, fuck it, that's what I mean, and that's what I'm going to say, and that's how I'm going to sing it.

You showed me how to breathe, never showed me how to say goodbye.

We really built this song, more so than any other Foo Fighter song we've ever recorded.

And my favorite part of the song really is the end of the song.

I imagined that the song would sort of collapse in on itself and deconstruct in this

massive wash of noise.

To me, this was the sound of

life ending.

Your final moments, I thought, just become this distortion of everything you've ever experienced in your life.

And then it just turns off.

The funny thing is, I imagined that ending for the song because I imagined everything ending.

But what I now realize is

it doesn't.

I don't believe that everything just stops.

I truly believe

that this is just some sort of transition.

I was probably my only friend

that enjoyed hanging out with their parent, you know.

She's cool.

She was really good at being a mother, especially the challenge of being my mother, I can't even imagine.

A hyperactive punk rock nightmare, but we were best friends.

I felt like I needed to honor her or pay tribute to her or do justice with this piece of music.

So that's when it turned into something other than just a song.

It's the most important thing that I've ever written because

I wrote it for such a gigantic reason.

I was wondering how you felt about this, but a few years ago, my mom passed away

and I wrote a song about her.

And, you know, there's...

this whole process of grief that you go through and then you try and put it together in a song.

But then there was like this extra little coda of grief for me, which is that I could never let her know that I did this thing for her.

I don't believe that.

I bet you could.

I bet she knows.

Is that how you feel about your mom?

Yes, and this song, yeah.

She's here, she knows for sure.

Yeah,

how do you think she feels about it?

About the song?

That's nice, David.

Coming up, you'll hear how all these ideas and elements came together in the final song.

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And now, here's The Teacher by Foo Fighters in its entirety.

These at the dawn of

the dawn.

These at the dawn of

Sun goes down and windows wide

One step closer than the other side

I can feel what others do

Can't stop this if I wanted to

Hey kid,

what's the plan for tomorrow?

Where will I wake up?

Where will I wake up?

Hey kid,

what's the plan for tomorrow?

Where will I wake up?

Where will I wake up?

Hurry down, boys, I won't wait.

The here and the now will separate.

There's some things you cannot choose.

Soul and spirit moving through

Hey Kid,

what's the plan for tomorrow?

Where will I wake up?

Where will I wake up?

Hey, Kid,

what's the plan for tomorrow?

Where will I wake up?

Where will I wake up?

Loses the golden

golden

loses.

Wake up.

Lose the golden.

Wake up.

ways.

Wade.

Two cold stones on a riverbed

Ripped and torn, cannon mend

Old white candles on a dusty porch

One flame down, another pour

Hey kid,

what's the plan for tomorrow?

Where will I wake up?

Where will I wake up?

Hey, kid,

what's the plan for tomorrow?

Where will I wake up?

Where will I wake up?

Who's it that don't know

who's it that don't know

You showed me how to breathe and showed me how to say goodbye

You showed me how to beat now, showed me how to say goodbye

Every page turns, it's a lesson learned in time

You showed me how to breathe now, showed me how to say goodbye

Trying to make good with the ear that's left

Counting every minute, living breath by breath by breath by breath by breath by breath

Try and make good with the year that's left

Counting every minute, living breath by breath by breath

showed me how to meet, you showed me how to say goodbye.

You showed me how to grieve now, showed me how to say goodbye.

Every page turns, it's a lesson learned in time.

You showed me how to need them, showed me how to say goodbye.

Try and make good with the others left.

Count every minute, living breath by breath by breath, by breath, by grandpa, grandpa.

Try and make good with the others left.

Count every minute, living breath by breath, by breath, by breath, by grandpa, breath.

To learn more, visit songexploder.net.

You'll find links to buy or stream the teacher, and you can watch the music video.

If you liked this episode, you might also like Metallica's episode from 2017.

You'll find that one at songxploder.net/slash metallica.

This episode was produced by Craig Ely, Theo Balcombe, Kathleen Smith, Mary Dolan, and me.

The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo.

Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm.

You can follow me on social media at Rishi Herway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder.

You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net/slash shirt.

This is the end of our 10th year of Song Exploder.

I'm Rishikesh Hiraway.

Thank you so much for listening.

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