Everlong by Foo Fighters

1997 shouldn’t have been a great year for Dave Grohl; his band Nirvana had recently fallen apart and his marriage was about to do the same. But that year was also the beginning of the Foo Fighters as a major band.

While Grohl had done all the work on the band’s debut himself, the second album The Colour & The Shape introduced a full band lineup (though with Grohl still in control; he even erased some of the original drum tracks and added his own). The album is meant to chart the course of a relationship, with “Everlong” sitting toward the end.

If you find some sonic similarities between this track and the Pixies’ Doolittle album, English producer Gil Norton did both.

The Foo Fighters wasn’t Dave Grohl’s first solo project. While still in Nirvana he released the cassette-only Pocketwatch album on the Simple Machines label, singing and playing all the instruments. He used the fake band name Late!

This song is only hard if you can’t keep up with it. The guitar part has a lot of power chords, which are best strummed up-and-down (Doing it all on the downstroke is possible, but tough). Watch for the yellow gem that turns up in a few of the chords.

The drum part requires a lot of sixteenth notes and a lot of red gems; you’ll fail quickly if you miss too many. If you make it to the chorus, you’ll have another pattern that involves a lot of red gems and kick drum; it’s not a regular four-four so get your bearings.

Ruling the world.