There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the balance between commercial success and authentic creativity.
Dave Grohl expresses the duality of success in the music industry, emphasizing that while it's impressive to sell out major venues like Wembley, true artistry often lies in the unrefined, raw process of creating music in a simple garage. He values the freedom to create without being confined by societal expectations or norms, celebrating both high-profile achievements and grassroots creativity.
In practice
In a speech at a music festival about the creative process.
There's a reason why the Foo Fighters don't blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that's hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn't really come up, or it just hasn't felt right.
I think my biggest musical hero growing up was probably Ian MacKaye. He set a great example for all of us local musicians. Still, to this day, I see him as the best example of a right-on musician.
Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that's the most important thing for people to do.
That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.
As I get older... I start to realize that life ain't half bad. Each year, I'm amazed that I'm still alive. I don't take any of this for granted, I'm a lucky dude.
When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine - it kinda sucks the life out of music.
I think the most interesting question is, why do you act? I act because I have felt in acting some of the most free moments of my life...I think it's also one thing that scares me the most.
Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.
The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.
It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.
Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone.
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