Foo Fighters at Midnight: The long winding road that led to their 10th studio album

When the Foo Fighters release their tenth studio album Medicine at Midnight on February 5, it’ll mark another milestone in the band’s storied career. No matter how small or large of a following an artist has, or how often their record release schedule is, hitting the ten album milestone is a cause for celebration.

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The ten album mark serves as a tangible representation of an artist’s commitment to their craft. Regardless of how commercially successful the makeup of their discography is, it’s a point where an artist carves out who they are and builds upon that as they progress into the future.

Foo Fighters are no exception to this rule. The path to their tenth album, Medicine at Midnight, hasn’t been linear as the band’s origins trace back to one of the most unique stories in music history. The fact they’ve arrived at this point in their career with the stature and body of work they’ve had is remarkable in and of itself.

There’s also a calculated risk the band took that’s turned out to pay dividends throughout their career. Being authentically themselves. “There’s an authenticity to what we do that could have not worked,” bassist Nate Mendel told RADIO.COM’s Ryan Castle, days before the Medicine at Midnight arrival.

“We are who we are. We get up there in jeans and t-shirts and not a lot of artifice and do what we do. At any point in time that could have been like, ‘OK we need more explosions and velvet and satin.’”

WATCH MORE: Foo Fighters' Nate Mendel on 'Medicine at Midnight' and 26 years of Foo

This milestone was never guaranteed and as talented as Dave Grohl is, even he couldn’t have imagined Foo Fighters becoming the entity it is today when he recorded a batch of songs in 1994 that made up their first album. “When I started the Foo Fighters, like I’ve never stood up with a guitar and been the singer of a band before,” Grohl told Castle in a 2014 interview. “But I thought, ‘screw it man, I’m just going to do it, what else am I going to do?’” he added.

If there’s one mantra that’s been consistent throughout the Foo Fighters career, it’s that anything is possible. Although it’s been a long, winding road, that driving force has led to this point. The story of how they arrived to this point is just as vital though. Here’s how they got here.

The birth of the Foo Fighters has been well documented since their official formation in 1994. Grohl was a member of Nirvana for four years, but his arrival in 1990 occurred just before the band experienced a meteoric rise in popularity off the success of Nevermind. After Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, Grohl was uncertain what the next phase of his career would look like.

Despite offers from big name groups like Danzig and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Grohl had no desire to get behind a drum set for another group. Prior to Cobain’s death, Grohl had already composed nine songs that eventually would end up on the Foo Fighters self-titled debut record.

Grohl booked a couple days worth of studio time at Seattle’s Robert Lang Studios to record these songs. At this time, the idea was never to recruit other musicians to join him and make a band. As a result, Grohl wound up recording the entire album by himself playing every single instrument. The only guest spot came from Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs, who played guitar on “X-Static.”

The reason Grohl didn’t go with his name on the project is because he wanted to keep a semblance of anonymity. Naturally, once fans and critics alike found out Grohl was behind the project, the comparisons to Nirvana began.

“Just before the first Foo's album came out, I thought, ‘How cute, the drummer from Nirvana made an album,’ RADIO.COM Postmodern host Scott Lowe said. “I was hardly prepared for the sonic assault of ‘This Is A Call’ or ‘I'll Stick Around,’ and there was also the perfect two-and-a-half minute pop song, ‘Big Me,’ which sounded more like The Beatles.  At that point, I knew there was a lot more to this guy then I had figured.”

Reviews for the album were positive and several tracks from the record have become Foo Fighter staples. “Dave Grohl could turn out to be the ’90s punk equivalent of Tom Petty, whose vocal timbre and wry manner he occasionally approximates here,” a 1995 Rolling Stone review said of the record. “Like Petty, Grohl displays a good-natured humility that belies his talent for nailing the raw emotional substance that lies just beneath the surface of the average rock cliché.”

Upon release of the album, Grohl faced constant questions about Kurt Cobain rather than his debut record he just put out. Even without the album, Grohl likely would have been faced with the same questions. Because of this, Grohl didn’t do many interviews or press during this time.

In a rare moment of transparency in this era, Grohl offered his feelings on the matter and wanted to give the public his perspective on why he didn’t want to talk.

“I understand that people want to know this, but there has to be a line drawn,” he said in a 1995 Rolling Stone profile.  “Because the day after your friend dies and American Journal wants to talk to you and Diane Sawyer wants to do an interview… It made me so f*****g angry. It made me so angry that nothing was sacred anymore. No one could just stop, not even for a day or a year or the rest of our lives, and just shut the f*** up. So I decided that I was just going to be the person to shut the f*** up.”

“I think about Kurt every day, and I miss him,” he added. “And I realize that I miss him. But at the same time things keep going, and I’ve got to make sure that things keep moving for me.”

Keep things moving, take a step forward. The only person that would allow Grohl to do that was himself. The seeds of the Foo’s “anything is possible” were born here as Grohl added “I don’t know if this band makes anyone else feel better — I just know I have to do it for myself. I have to feel like I’m moving forward.”

Move forward he did as Grohl brought on bassist Nate Mendel, guitarist Pat Smear, and drummer William Goldsmith along to tour the world, and quickly established a fanbase. Mendel recalled his first impressions hearing Grohl’s demo tapes of what eventually became the first Foo Fighters album. “I thought it was great,” he told Ryan Castle.

“I was just coming out of Sunny Day Real Estate at the time. I heard that music and Sunny Day was a little relatively proggy compared to the early Foo Fighters stuff. There was a simplicity to it. I was like, ‘I’d love to be in this band so I could put crazy bass on this.’”

“Eventually we got into the band and [I] was like, ‘oh the bass is pretty good the way it is.’ It turns out I’d bend to the band more than the band bending to me,” he added with a laugh.

With the addition of the three members and success touring internationally, the Foo Fighters foundation was built and they carried significant momentum going into their second album.

When the Foo Fighters entered the studio in 1996 to begin work on their second studio album, The Colour and the Shape, it marked the first time they were doing so as a band.

Despite their exhaustive touring schedule over the course of 18 months, the group had a lot going for them at the time. That momentum didn’t translate to the studio as numerous issues arose that threatened to disrupt what the Foo Fighters had built.

“Two marriages fell apart, we lost a drummer, someone nearly went to jail, and we discovered late in the day that record making is hellishly expensive and best done with a budget prepared beforehand,” Nate Mendel wrote in the liner notes of the album’s 10th anniversary reissue.

Let’s unpack that a bit. Grohl separated from his wife, Jennifer Leigh Youngblood, in 1996 before the couple ultimately divorced a year later. In a 1997 interview with Vox magazine, Dave called the sequencing of the album “a therapy session.” "The first song, ‘Doll’, is all about your fear of entering into something you weren’t prepared for, which is the way I feel about mostly everything,” Grohl said.

"I go through this whole therapy session, and I end up at the last track, when I realize that it’s OK, I can make my way through all of this, and I’m not that freaked out at the end. We were joking for a while when we were thinking about work for the album. I thought, why don’t we put a picture of a therapist’s couch on it? For the rest of my life, when I listen to this record, it will be the Fall of 1996, and my journal entries, which is a little strange."

There was another issue that arose during the recording of the record. Their drummer, William Goldsmith, wound up departing the band. Gil Norton, the album’s producer, recalled the situation in an interview: “We never intended to lose him. He just went into meltdown, that was the problem, he went AWOL for a while.”

“It was Christmas and I went home after the first recording session in Seattle, and said to Dave [Grohl] that I don’t think we’ve got the right parts in all these songs,” Norton added. Grohl didn’t intend to drum on the record and Norton didn’t want to ask him to, but he ended up doing so as the duo felt the drums needed more work.

“The first song we re-did was ‘Monkey Wrench.’ Dave did a run through to get the sounds, and then did it in one take,” Norton said. When Goldsmith caught wind that Grohl was overdubbing his drums, he decided to leave the band.

Grohl touched on the situation in a 2011 interview saying, "there were a lot of reasons it didn't work out, but there was also a part of me that was like, you know, I don't know if I'm finished playing the drums yet. I wish that I would have handled things differently."

In the midst of potential chaos, there was one effect that would alter the band’s future for good. The addition of Alanis Morissette’s tour drummer Taylor Hawkins.

The Colour and the Shape also taught the band an important lesson that would serve as future motivation to lean on the “do it yourself” mentality. Making an album is an expensive process.

Foo Fighters trekked to Bear Creek Studios in Washington to begin recording the album. What started off promisingly quickly went awry as the band decided to scrap almost all of the tracks they recorded.

After taking some time off for the holidays, the band reconvened at Hollywood's Grandmaster Recorders. While this move proved successful, it also meant the band faced mounting pressure due to pushed up deadlines and a growing budget. As we’ll see later on, this became a learning experience for the band helping to motivate them to take recording matters into their own hands.

As for the album? It’s currently their best-selling record to date and helped launch the band’s popularity into the stratosphere. “September of '97 at KKND in New Orleans, the Foo Fighters played our station music festival,” RADIO.COM’s Vince Richards of 100.3 JACK FM said. “The Colour and the Shape had been released a few months earlier. The band was still relatively new but I knew they had a large following. We wanted them badly to play our show. The problem was they were booked to play another show that night in another city, I believe Atlanta.”

Richards adds: “After weeks of back and forth, we booked the band early in the line up so they could play the headlining show later that night. 95% of the audience were at the show before 12 noon to see them play around 2 pm. All the other bands on the line up were on the side of the stage as the Foo Fighters set the tone for the rest of the show. No other band that day lived up to what the Foo Fighters had left on the stage. It was at that point I realized this band was the real deal and would make a mark in the music business.”

The “anything is possible” mantra is one the Foo Fighters have carried throughout their career. This was especially evident during the creation of their third studio album There Is Nothing Left to Lose.

For Grohl, “anything is possible” has been a lifelong attitude that stems from his formative years. “Growing up in Washington DC, in that underground punk rock community, one thing that I learned was that anything is possible,” he told RADIO.COM’s Ryan Castle.

“A lot of people stop themselves when they have ideas or when they’re inspired because they think they just couldn’t pull it off or that something is unachievable or impossible. I’ve never really thought that way.”

At this point in the Foo’s career, that mantra took the form of buying a house and turning it into your own recording studio. The band left Capitol Records, giving them the freedom to pursue their own recording opportunities. Grohl took advantage of this and bought a house in Alexandria, Virginia a mile from where he went to high school.

After building a studio in the home’s basement, the Foo Fighters spent four months in the Virginia home making the record. That was a deliberate choice on their behalf and helped feed into the direction they envisioned for the record. "The way we recorded was so real and natural," Grohl said in a 1999 interview with The Guardian. "We didn't use any computers, anything digital or any of that auto-tuning s***. All you need are songs that deserve to be heard, a couple of friends, and a genuine direction."

Funny enough, Grohl called their hit single “Learn to Fly,” “one of my least favorite songs on the record” in the same interview.

It’d be easy to assume Grohl, Hawkins, and Mendel all developed some cerebral connection with one another during the recording process since they were all living together. However, it was clear that Grohl was steering the ship and that’s something Hawkins and Mendel were not shy to admit.

“You have to have someone who has the main vision,” Hawkins said in a 1999 interview with Rock Sound. “If me and Nate challenged every one of Dave's ideas then it would take us three years to make a record. I think that Nate, especially, and me come up with little things to help change the songs here and there, but you gotta have some sorta of leadership and Dave writes the songs.”

There Is Nothing Left to Lose went on to enjoy massive success and wound up winning a GRAMMY for Best Rock Album. The experience of making an album on their own turned out to be a rewarding one and helped give the band a rubric for how to operate moving forward.

“When we won for best rock album for our third record, which we made in my basement, I was so proud because we made it in my basement in a crappy makeshift studio that we put together ourselves,” Grohl said in an interview with the Associated Press.

“I stood there looking out at everybody in tuxedos and diamonds and fur coats, and I thought we were probably the only band that won a GRAMMY for an album made for free in a basement that year.”

“This band is as healthy as it is as a result of all the dysfunction that we’ve experienced in every other band we’ve been in.”

That’s what Dave Grohl told Rolling Stone in a 2005 interview. It serves as a good summary of the middle part of the band's career. In 2002 they released One by One, In Your Honor in 2005, and Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace in 2007. Each record can be looked back upon fondly, with some fans likely viewing it as the band’s finest work.

That’s not to say the band hasn’t experienced tension within the group, it’s just not something they dwell on. “At various points through the process, things get heated,” Grohl said in the 2005 profile. “There’s always a meltdown, because it’s such a delicate balance. If we didn’t love each other as a band, then it would fall apart.”

Grohl disputes the idea that tension can drive creativity. “But the idea that the whole Some Kind of Monster tension and conflict produces results is a load of crap,” he said. “You know what that produces? F***** lawyers and b******g about publishing. It’s a crock of s***. Like, I don’t think the Oasis brothers hate each other. They only make good music because they love each other.”

There were times during this period that were marked by uncertainty and had their calm and collective spirits not been present, it may have escalated further. During the making of One by One, Grohl halted the recording sessions after the band had spent three and a half months and $500,000 on the album. The album was recorded using the popular digital audio workstation Pro Tools and Grohl felt that it was too polished.

He stepped away from the Foo Fighters to tour as the drummer for Queens Of The Stone Age. While Grohl didn’t feel as if his choice threatened the Foo Fighters, his other bandmates admit it was a period where they were uncertain if Grohl was going to break up the band. "It felt like we were in limbo," Nate Mendel said in a 2002 interview with Kerrang!. Guitarist Chris Shiflett admitted "there were a couple weeks where I was pretty scared."

This experience provided Grohl and his bandmates a valuable lesson. Communication is key. Grohl admitted he thought his bandmates were “probably scared,” but added that “the dramatic element of what happened has been somewhat overblown.”

Whatever occurred during that time period stuck with the band throughout the years and had an impact on them. "It's funny because that sticks with us to this day as being this real shaky period. Which in some ways it was, but a band can always implode at any time. It's always fragile," Dave said about the making of One by One in a 2008 interview with Classic Rock.

Following the end of the Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace tour in 2008, the band knew it was time to try something they hadn’t really done in their 13 years together. Take a break.

“Over the years we’ve experimented in all these different directions and it was kind of like stretching a rubber band and you let it go and it snaps back. I listen to the record and it just sounds like the last 16 years to me. It has elements of almost every album, Pat Smear is back with us and playing on the record. The songs are bigger and the choruses are bigger.”

That’s what Dave Grohl told RADIO.COM station KROQ in a 2011 interview prior to the release of their album Wasting Light.

Although the Foo Fighters have no problem pushing the boundaries with each album release and continually strive to improve from record to record, this album was different.

“At this point this is our seventh album and everytime we make a record it’s kind of a response to the one that came before it. The last couple records we’ve really experimented with different instrumentation and dynamic,” Grohl said. “All of those things were necessary just to keep the band going, to experiment with things that we haven’t done before.”

You could easily point to a variety of reasons why Wasting Light was the perfect album at the perfect time in this part of the Foo Fighters career. For one, they already had established themselves as one of the finest rock acts out there. At the same time, they had constantly been present whether it be through new albums or tours that made it seem like you couldn’t avoid hearing about them no matter how hard you tried.

That wasn’t lost on Grohl and his bandmates. As a result, they knew they had to take a step out of the spotlight following the end of their Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace tour in 2008. “We intentionally stepped back from it and took a break. We started feeling like it was time. We hadn’t really taken any time off for about five or six years in a row,” Grohl said in a separate 2011 interview with KROQ.

“More than that we started feeling like maybe we should give the listeners a break. All we do is make records and put songs on the radio and they’ve been listening to us for so long, maybe it’s time that we should wait until they actually want it.”

Using data from setlist.fm, the Foo Fighters performed a total of 1,016 concerts by the end of 2008. That means in their 13 years as a band at that point, they were performing on average 78 shows a year.

You couldn’t really blame them for wanting to take a step back and recuperate. In 2009 and 2010, they performed only 13 shows, a far cry from what the band and fans had been accustomed to in years prior.

This time off afforded the band the opportunity to not only recharge, but to create a new vision. Make an album that would define the band. “There are a few bands that later in their career have made one album that kinda defines the band,” Grohl said in a 2010 interview with Kerrang!.  “It might not be their best album, but it's the one people identify the band with the most, like [AC/DC's] Back In Black or the Metallica Black record. It's like you take all of the things that people consider your band's signature characteristics and just amplify them and make one simple album with that.”

Making a career-defining record is easier said than done, but now that the Foo’s had their vision they had to put the pieces in place to give them the best shot at success. They brought on legendary producer Butch Vig, who has produced albums like Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream, Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown, and most notoriously Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Vig certainly had the credentials to help spearhead the effort on creating a career-defining record. That’s what drew the band to him as Grohl mentioned to Kerrang!, “Butch has a great way of trimming all the fat and making sense of it all.”

There was another event that took place that served as a monumental moment. The return of Pat Smear as a full time member. Smear and Grohl have a long relationship with one another as they both were members of Nirvana in the late stages of the band’s history. Smear was also a Foo Fighter, having left the band just after they released The Colour and the Shape. He’d been playing with the band part time since 2006, but his commitment to being a part of the group full time in 2010 ushered in the modern era of the Foo Fighters.

Smear had a great influence on the band, but what his return really signified was a sense of lineup stability the Foo Fighters hadn’t really enjoyed for a continual period of time. The core group of Grohl, Smear, Mendel, Hawkins, and Shiflett (as well as keyboardist Rami Jaffee who joined the band full time in 2017) was finally in place and there hasn’t been a change in their lineup since then.

As the band got ready to head into recording at Dave Grohl’s garage in Encino, California, the Foo Fighters frontman issued a challenge. Ditch digital recording techniques in favor of only using analog equipment. “My initial response when Dave first told me that we were going to be recording the new record in his garage to tape, without using any computers, was that he couldn't be serious. But he was deadly serious,” producer Butch Vig told Rhythm in a 2011 interview.

As accomplished a producer as Vig is, he was forced to shake off the rust to accommodate the all analog mandate. He admitted the first razor blade edit he did took him 20 minutes when he used to be able to do 20 edits in half an hour.

With little room for error, the band was forced to be tight in their recording sessions. This would suit them well as it forced the Foo Fighters to get intimately familiar with the music.

They took their time recording the album, spending a total of eleven weeks making the record. Each song was done in a week with the drum tracks recorded on a Monday morning with a rough mix of the song done by Friday evening.  "We stuck to that and it was good because each song kinda had its own life,” Vig told Sound on Sound in a 2012 interview. “Once we were focused on a song for a week, that's pretty much all we did. In a way, you had a sense of completion.”

The band sets a high bar for themselves during studio recordings, something that was brazenly clear during the Wasting Light sessions. With the benefit of time, they can poke fun at perfectionist tendencies. “Anybody that’s got even a glancing familiarity with our band knows that we’re not perfectionists,” Nate Mendel told Ryan Castle while trying to hold back a laugh.

When Wasting Light was released on April 12, 2011, their ambitious efforts paid off. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart as Rolling Stone called Wasting Light “the best Foos album since the first two.”

The album and its songs received a total of five GRAMMY nominations and won the award for Best Rock Album.

Wasting Light can certainly be looked back on as a career-defining record for the Foo Fighters. The ambition they set forth ahead of the record as well as the circumstances surrounding it were nothing short of spectacular.

So how do you follow something like that up? Set the bar even higher.

If you added up the collective miles each member of the Foo Fighters has traveled across the world throughout their music career, well, there’s probably not a frequent flyer status level that would cover it.

After taking a self-imposed break, which in Foo Fighters terms is not a very long time, the band began work on what would be their eighth studio album in early 2013.

Before they began work on the album, an important Grohl side project came to fruition that would ultimately help shape the Foo Fighters next record. Grohl produced and directed the documentary Sound City, a film chronicling the history of the iconic Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Los Angeles.

The film marked Grohl’s directorial debut and helped him tap into his cinematic side. This would prove fruitful in setting up the vision for the next Foo Fighters record. “After making the Sound City movie, I realized that the pairing of music and documentary worked so well because the stories give substance and depth to the song, which makes a stronger emotional connection to it,” Grohl said in a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

“I had a blast on Sound City and a wonderful team that worked on the movie with me and I thought, I wanna do this again,” he added. “I love music, I know music, I understand music, so I wanna stay in this world. But instead of just walking into a studio and telling its story, I want to travel across America and tell its story.”

From there, the vision for their next album was born. Marry the story of American music through music and video. On paper, the premise was pretty simple. Travel to eight different cities, document their musical history and speak with musicians from the city, and record a song based on the musical influences of that city.

The Foo Fighters have never let the challenge of logistics get in the way of a good idea. Still, it took a while to convince everyone to get on board with making a show, but once they did, the band faced a new challenge. Getting money to actually make the show. “The money part is funny cause going around and trying to raise money for anything is always a challenge,” Grohl told RADIO.COM’s Ryan Castle in a 2014 interview.

“It took us a while to figure out that the best way for us to do it is to just go play two stadiums in Mexico and then take that money and pay for it. That’s basically what we did.”

Old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, can’t beat it.

With funding in place, the Foo Fighters set off on a journey across America to begin making their eighth studio album Sonic Highways and an HBO miniseries of the same name. Once again, Butch Vig was tapped to produce the album.

Their adventures took the Foos to Chicago, Washington D.C., Nashville, Austin, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Seattle, and New York City. At each stop, Grohl would take pen to paper and write lyrics that were inspired by the city’s musical history as well as his interviews with various musicians. The band would then head to a recording location in the city to lay down the track.

They would also perform shows at small venues that held a historical significance to the city they were recording in. It was a great concept, but bassist Nate Mendel recalled the gig they played at the Showbox, a club with a capacity of just over 1,100 people, that turned out to be a nightmare. “That may be the worst show of my life,” he told Ryan Castle. “We’re pretty accustomed to just playing through whatever, but I had had just a brutal bout of stomach flu the day before."

“I had a paramedic friend of mine come up and get me a bag of IV, which was almost useless," he added. “It was probably the apex of this time where we were trying to make shows as long as we could... The combination of deathly illness and length of the show was just f*****g brutal.”

Sonic Highways wasn’t the first album to feature guest musicians, but it was certainly one of the most unique set of circumstances in which they appeared. Each track featured a musician with ties to the city they were recording in. Zac Brown joined the band in Nashville while the Preservation Hall Jazz Band joined them in New Orleans.

A wide variety of artists that didn’t appear on the record made appearances in the miniseries. It was truly a diverse showcase of the musical melting pot that is America.

The entire Sonic Highways venture proved successful for the band as the album hit number one on the Billboard Rock, Alternative, and Hard Rock charts while peaking at number two on the Billboard 200 chart. The HBO miniseries also nabbed a GRAMMY nomination for Best Music Film.

The timing of Sonic Highways also proved to be notable as it aligned with the band’s 20th anniversary. Formed in 1994 as an outlet for Dave Grohl to record a handful of songs he’d written throughout the years, Foo Fighters had now blossomed into a full-fledged international phenomenon.

The fascinating part about the Foo Fighters is that everything written above just scratches the surface of their career. They’re an endlessly fascinating group made up of endlessly fascinating individuals.

As a new chapter in the Foo Fighters story gets set to be written with the release of their tenth studio album Medicine at Midnight, we wanted to get perspective on what it is that makes them one of rock’s most beloved groups.

Instead of finishing the article with a grandiose statement on the legacy of the Foo Fighters and what their music means to the world, we’ll turn it over to the pros. Here’s how RADIO.COM programmers and on-air talent describe the Foo Fighters in their own words.

“Dave Grohl will go down as one of the most legendary rockers of all time,” Taryn Daly of KISW-FM in Seattle said. “He is pure class, he is friends with EVERYONE (seriously, could you imagine scrolling through his phone?? Paul McCartney... Stevie Nicks... Brian May...). He and this band have managed to bring generations together, their music transcending decades and influencing people of all ages and backgrounds.”

“They represent the ‘everyman,’” Adam Sprenger of 104.1 JACK FM in Minneapolis said. “When Dave broke his leg and continued to tour using the Throne, that was completely badass. Get up and go to work everyday.... I love it.”

Marty Lennartz of WXRT-FM in Chicago says the Foo Fighters have the incredible ability to make “great songs that are influenced by so many that came before.”

“But they make those influences their own by altering dynamics from soft to loud, melodic to dissonant, which enables their songs to be more like hummable hard rock that headbangers and song lovers both can embrace.”

“Rock hasn't generated a lot of household names in the last 25 years.  Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters are one of the rare exceptions.” RADIO.COM’s Ryan Castle added.

Pat Martin of KRXQ-FM in Sacramento put it best. “They've brought joy back to rock 'n' roll. Their concerts are more than just a show, they're events. They've made rock music cool again.”

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