Dave Grohl

‘After Nirvana I needed music to keep me alive. It’s the reason I never stopped’

At 16 I was already fully immersed in music, and learning to write and record and perform. I was a music junkie. So I was amassing this crazy record collection, most of it underground independent punk rock bands. But I wasn’t only listening to the albums for personal enjoyment. I was learning to play my instruments from them. I never took drum lessons, I just learned from listening to Led Zeppelin and Bad Brains and The Police and Sex Pistols records. I didn’t have a teacher to show me how to write songs, I just had a Beatles songbook. I would sit and play along to Beatles songs, and I started understanding composition and arrangement and harmony and melody and dissonance. And riff and core and rhythm. So, I was pretty locked into my bedroom at that age. If I wasn’t on the bus to and from school I was in my bedroom, just studying these albums.

because my mother was a high school English teacher at the fucking school I knew I was failing in. I really had little interest in what most people thought was the conventional route to take in life. I just thought, when I’m free I’m just going to play music and find a