Part of the appeal of Foo Fighters in their early days was to see Dave Grohl branch out beyond the shadow of Nirvana. Although Grohl initially didn’t want to put his name on the album, word of mouth surrounding the band started to put a mantle of pressure on Grohl that he didn’t need on his debut record. While he proved that he could be a songwriter in his own right on tracks like ‘Big Me’ and ‘I’ll Stick Around’, it wouldn’t be until the following LP that everything began to go astray.
Assembling a band to work out the material on the road, Grohl had already started to work up material for the next release during soundchecks. While Grohl would famously come up with the riff to tracks like ‘Enough Space’ by watching crowds bounce up and down, bassist Nate Mendel didn’t figure out that the band had a future until listening to one of the newer songs that Grohl presented them before a show.
When talking about the production of The Colour and the Shape, Mendel told Back and Forth, “I had no idea how it was going to go. And then, I knew we were going to be okay when I heard the song ‘My Hero’, because it was great”. Even though Grohl created one of the band’s greatest hits on a whim, getting the rest of the album done featured him unpacking a lot of emotional baggage.
Outside of dealing with the sting of Nirvana’s death, Grohl was also in the midst of a breakup with his wife, Jennifer Youngblood. After spending time on the road and growing apart emotionally, the songs on the following record chronicled different pieces of the pair’s split, like the massive sounds of romantic euphoria on ‘Everlong’.
Throughout the process, Grohl remembered feeling like he was in therapy throughout the recording, recalling, “We were joking for a while when we were thinking about work for the album. I thought, why don’t we put a picture of a therapist’s couch on it? For the rest of my life, when I listen to this record, it will be the fall of 1996 and my journal entries, which is a little strange”.
While Grohl has never been one to write a lavish concept album, The Colour and the Shape could also be seen as a musical breakdown of his previous relationship. Starting with the song ‘Doll’, Grohl talks about the fear of rushing into the situation and becoming something he hates. Throughout the rest of the album, Grohl practically plays out the different degrees of separation, from the massive kissoff ‘Monkey Wrench’ to bargaining on ‘Everlong’ to finally coming to acceptance on the massive closer ‘New Way Home’.
Although Grohl bore his soul on the rest of the record, he didn’t play nice with the rest of the group. When putting the tracks together, drummer William Goldsmith quit the band when he discovered that Grohl had recorded his original tracks with his own performance. Granted, if Grohl was writing songs that were this close to his soul, it should come as no surprise that he wanted the takes to be exactly the way he wanted.
