What would the late Kurt Cobain think of Foo Fighters? Dave Grohl doesn’t care

Dave Grohl is currently in the midst of promoting Foo Fighters latest record, Medicine at Midnight. 

The rock legend recently at down with NME in an interview that saw him reveal that he never thinks about what late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would think of Foo Fighters music.

During the interview segment, NME referenced a 2019 interview with Paul McCartney for Uncut magazine in which he revealed that he frequently ponders on how John Lennon would receive his songwriting of the now. When NME asked Grohl if he ever experiences the same phenomena, Grohl mused. “No, I don’t – and I’ll tell you why!”

“For 25 fucking years, that’s been something I’ve been judged by and from the get-go, you have to realise that it’s a dangerous place to be,” he explained. “You can’t create or judge anything by someone else’s standards.”

Dave Grohl went on to detail the anxiety he had to overcome when first hitting the studio to record the debut Foo Fighters record the year following Cobain’s passing.

“It’s funny because I kept this little project a secret for so long before it became a band, and one of the reasons was for fear that people would judge it. That’s all of the weird little demo tapes I’d done, I just didn’t feel comfortable sharing because they were mine,” Grohl said.

“There was some safety and security in just keeping them to myself, so one of the reasons I started this band was to move on from the past. The band truly represents this continuation of life because I didn’t want to remain in that place forever and I just couldn’t. I would have suffocated.”

Foo Fighters released their tenth studio album, Medicine at Midnight, on February 5th. We sat down with the band to discuss their latest offering in-depth — you can read the feature here.

Get unlimited access to the coverage that shapes our culture.

Subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine

Subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine