Sessions for The Colour and the Shape had turned genuinely difficult by early 1997. Producer Gil Norton — described by Grohl in his own memoir as "a notorious taskmaster" — was pushing the band through 30 or 40 takes of every song, and drummer William Goldsmith's playing had become a persistent source of tension; Norton reportedly told Goldsmith and bassist Nate Mendel bluntly that they were "the rhythmless section." In the middle of that grind, Grohl was served divorce papers from his wife, Jennifer Youngblood, directly at the studio. He left for a friend's place in Virginia and, alone with an acoustic guitar in drop-D tuning, wrote "Everlong" in around 45 minutes.

What you're hearing

The song's instantly recognizable intro riff had actually surfaced earlier and separately — Grohl stumbled onto the chord while fooling around between takes during the recording of "Monkey Wrench," the album's lead single, also cut in drop-D. He initially dismissed it as sounding a little too much like a Sonic Youth riff before deciding he liked it enough to keep. On "Everlong" itself, the band's usual five-piece lineup narrows to just three players: Grohl on both rhythm guitar and drums, Pat Smear on lead guitar, and Nate Mendel on bass — a direct byproduct of the tension with the album's original drummer.

A phone call to Chicago, at 2am

The song's lyrics trace to a brief romance Grohl had with Louise Post of the band Veruca Salt, and he wanted her voice specifically on the track's ghostly, wordless backing vocals. She was in Chicago while the band tracked in Hollywood, so the band improvised: Post recorded her parts live, over an actual telephone connection, using two separate phone lines — one so she could monitor what she was singing, the other feeding directly into the recording. She's since described being woken from a deep sleep at 2am to do it. When Grohl first played producer Gil Norton the raw demo, Norton knew immediately it belonged on the record. "It made the album whole," he later said. "It was the catalyst that held everything together."

How it's done

Turning personal crisis and technical limits into finished material, componentized:

LET A DISCARDED RIFF SIT UNTIL IT FINDS ITS SONG: the drop-D chord Grohl found messing around during a different song's session wasn't used immediately — it waited, half-formed, until the right lyric and moment arrived to build a whole song around it WRITE FAST WHEN THE EMOTION IS ALREADY THERE: forty-five minutes is an unusually short turnaround for a song this structurally considered — real urgency, channeled directly, produced something more finished than extended deliberation might have TURN A LOGISTICAL LIMIT INTO A CREATIVE METHOD: needing a specific voice that wasn't physically present didn't cancel the idea — recording over a live phone call became the actual technique, audible texture and all, rather than a workaround to disguise LET ONE STRONG SONG REORIENT A STRUGGLING SESSION: rather than trying to fix the entire album's flagging energy at once, the band let a single, undeniable new song function as the anchor the rest of the record could reorganize around

The transferable lesson: a song written under real emotional pressure, fast and without much deliberation, can sometimes do more for a struggling project than months of careful, high-standard grinding — and a technical constraint, embraced rather than hidden, can become part of what makes a recording distinctive.

The Moment

Grohl calls Louise Post in Chicago at 2am and has her sing backing vocals live down the phone line into the Los Angeles session — the "doo" harmonies on the finished track are literally a transatlantic-style phone call, kept in the mix.

What it did

"Everlong" peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, has surpassed a billion streams on Spotify, and is widely regarded as the Foo Fighters' signature song — a fixture at nearly every show the band has played since. David Letterman named it his favorite song ever performed on his program, and the band's performance of it on his show following his return from heart surgery remains one of the most fondly remembered moments in the show's history. Written in less time than it takes to watch a sitcom episode, by a member of a band whose internal chemistry was actively falling apart in the studio around him, it became the song that — by its own producer's account — kept the whole record from collapsing.

Sources & further listening

  1. Dave Grohl's memoir The Storyteller and his account of the song's writing via Oates Song Fest.
  2. Producer Gil Norton's and Louise Post's accounts, via Paul Brannigan's biography This Is a Call and American Songwriter.
  3. Core listening: "Everlong," "Monkey Wrench," "Walking After You."