For the final podcast episode of the year, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl joins Song Exploder to discuss the band's 2023 10-minute epic, "The Teacher," the track he considers the most important piece of music he’s ever written.
LISTEN NOW: Song Exploder | Foo Fighters - 'The Teacher'
Foo Fighters' "The Teacher" was offered up earlier this year on the group's 11th studio album But Here We Are, which was dedicated to Dave's mother, Virginia, who passed away in July 2022, as well as late drummer Taylor Hawkins.
The guitar parts for "The Teacher," Grohl says, came to him during the time he was visiting his mother in the hospital, just months after the sudden passing of Hawkins. “Everyday during that period, I would write something on the guitar, because I felt that if I didn’t have that release, I would explode," he explains. "I would spend the day at the hospital and then try to translate it musically -- with no clear intention of what I was trying to achieve," Dave adds. "I was finding these chords and progressions that mirrored the way that I felt.”
"She was the most important person in my entire life," Dave says of his mother, Virginia -- a lifelong teacher turned band mom extraordinaire. "So I thought this had to be the most important music I ever made,” he admits.
Faced with two separate demos, he chose to merge them into one epic piece in tribute realizing, "It’s more than a 3 or 4-minute song. It’s something much bigger… I could have a piece of music bigger than anything that we’ve ever done that I could dedicate to my mother.”
Breaking down the track into its two halves, Grohl says the first half of the song "is meant to build to a crescendo," going through the emotion of his mother's passing, while the second half of the song is "reflection.” Grohl said.
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Lyrically, Dave explains that the line "Where will I wake up?" was a question Virginia had asked her son during the final days of her life, while the line "Wake up!" was his way of attempting to delay the inevitable. “I think someone’s immediate reaction to seeing someone dying is to wish for them to wake up, but that’s not how it works," he says. "One of my greatest fears in life is that I would be gone when this happened — gone on the road, not present for this. I was there and we were there together."
Ending the song, Dave says he "imagined the song would collapse in on itself, deconstruct in this massive wash of noise. To me this was the sound of life ending. Your final moments just become this distortion of everything you’ve ever experienced in life — and then it just turns off."
“But what I now realize is it doesn’t,” Grohl continues. “I don’t believe everything just stops. I truly believe that this is just some sort of transition."
Listen to the full discussion with Dave Grohl on the Song Exploder podcast -- now playing on Audacy -- where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Each episode features an artist discussing a song of theirs, breaking down the sounds and ideas that went into the writing and recording. Hosted and produced by Hrishikesh Hirway.