Music

Foo Fighters "happier and ready to go" for next album

by Ciaran Thompson

It has been three years since Foo Fighters released their Grammy Award-winning album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace and starting this month the band, whose members have been busy with their own respective solo projects, will reconvene to start recording what will be their seventh studio album.

Last Saturday guitarist Chris Shiflett performed at the Drake Hotel in Toronto in support of his recently released solo debut as Chris Shiflett & The Dead Peasants. Earlier that day AUX sat down with the Foo’s axeman on the rooftop patio of the venue and chatted about his recent project and what’s happening with Dave Grohl and co.

“These are the first shows we’ve done since the record has been out,” Shiflett said. “You gotta get in that mindset where you’re trying to win a handful of people at this bar over when probably most of them have never heard the record. It’s a good challenge.”

After a few listens, it’s evident the album takes a lot of influence from Country and Americana, something Shiflett has always enjoyed listening to, however getting a name for his backing band proved to be somewhat challenging.

“Originally I was going to call the band Chris Shiflett and the Campesinos,” he said only to realize that name was already taken by the ever expanding Welsh band Los Campesinos!. “I went to go see that last Michael Moore movie and there’s a section in that where he’s talking about insurance policies that corporations take out on their employers without them knowing. It’s referred to in the industry as ‘dead peasant’ policy and when I heard that I said I have to take that, it’s a good little phrase.”

Even once he found the name for the band there was still a little bit of controversy that will forever leave Shiflett with one less young fan. “Some kid posted on my Facebook thing, ‘I hate your band, you stole our name, fuck you.’ I looked at it and it was this teenager. I emailed him back and said ‘that’s awfully strong language, son’ and he never replied.”

While recording the self-titled album, Shiflett said he approached it in a similar way to making a rock record, however the results from the first few demos weren’t what he had originally intended leading him to question “why does everybody sound like the fucking Goo Goo Dolls? It was too slick and layered, it sounded wrong.” The band peeled back some of the layers to give it more of a raw sound that’s heard on the final cut.

Now that his solo album is out and touring is set to wrap up in the coming weeks, Shiflett has already starting thinking, like the other band members, about the next Foo Fighters album.

“Everybody goes off and does there thing and sort of gets refreshed and comes back as happier and ready to go,” he said. “We’ve been rehearsing and learning songs, sort of demoing stuff. When I get home we pretty much will jump into making the record. I think a couple weeks in August we’ll be doing some rehearsing still and hopefully start recording in September.

“That thing from rehearsal to official recording is usually kind of blurred. Every Foo Fighters record that I’ve been involved in has been a different process. This time we’ve done a solid amount of rehearsing and learning the songs.”

Although he now has a solo project under his belt as well as collaborations with several other bands such as Jackson United and Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Shiflett says the songwriting is still left exclusively to frontman Dave Ghrol and there’s good reason for it.

“He’s (Dave) pretty prolific. He writes a lot so it’s just not part of the deal. That’s why I do side projects so I don’t bug him. That’s what breaks bands up.”