90 Quotes by Dave Grohl

Always have the highest bar for yourself. Wake up everyday and no matter how crappy you feel, want to change something for the better. Do something that makes someone happy. Create something that inspires someone. Be someone's light when they are hopeless.

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.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

You will only be great at things you love to do don't pursue a career in something you hate to do.

Never lose faith in real rock and roll music. Never lose faith in that. You might have to look a little harder, but it's always going to be there.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It's a black wall. It's a thief.

In this day and age, when you can use a machine or computer to simulate or emulate what people can do together, it still can't replace the magic of four people in a room playing.

How do I stay humble? Because I'm the best at being humble.

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I don't think of Kurt as 'Kurt Cobain from Nirvana'. I think of him as 'Kurt'. It's something that comes back all the time. Almost every day.

There's always gonna be rock n' roll bands, there's always gonna be kids that love rock n' roll records, and there will always be rock n' roll.

I think that if you're passionate about something and you're driven and you're focused, then you can pretty much do anything that you want to do in life.

Ladies and gentlemen, god bless America - land of the free, home of the brave.

You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I've never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.

Don't look at the poster on your wall and think 'I could never do that.' Look at the poster on your wall and think 'I'm gonna do that!'

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

To women, drummers seem like these adorable, sexy Neanderthals, but lead singers seem mysterious and dangerous. So while the lead singers all want to be David Bowie, floating into parties and being the center of attention, it's the drummers who are in the corner doing keg stands and breaking tables. Usually it's the drummers who get the fun-loving ladies and the singers who get the nutcases.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that's stripped down.

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There's something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that 'Everlong' is on it, or 'Best of You' is on it, and it's really special.

There's some things in life that you really consider to be priceless.

You look up to your heroes and you shouldn't be intimidated by them; you should be inspired by them.

I'm big on taking the lady out to dinner. We have some candlelight romance every now and then. And our whole family is within a 6-mile radius. It's disgustingly domestic. I'm big on Costco.

From one generation to the next, The Beatles will remain the most important rock band of all time.

Just the other day someone threw a bra duct-taped to a tennis ball. I just stood there, playing guitar, thinking how this was totally premeditated. Some girl sat around inventing a way to get her bra onstage from 40 rows back.

If it weren't for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

Neil Young is my hero, and such a great example. You know what that guy has been doing for the past 40 years? Making music. That's what that guy does. Sometimes you pay attention, sometimes you don't. Sometimes he hands it to you, sometimes he keeps it to himself. He's a good man with a beautiful family and wonderful life.

I'd like to imagine I won't end up in Hell, but I think I've done too much acid and listened to too much death metal to sit on a cloud next to God with angels floating above my head.

There's something about heartbreak that makes for great music, but the same could be said for Jägermeister. Hangovers make for great music, too.

Nothing's going to keep me from making music. If I were in the want-ads in the back of the paper or playing to six people at a coffee shop, I'd still love to make music.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can't let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn't even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

Mom, thanks for letting me drop out of high school. Haha!

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer - I don't know if they'd ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

The human element of making music is what's most important.

I think people should feel encouraged to be themselves.

Most people don't take some things into consideration. When they hear an album, they hear the artist or they hear the lyric or they hear the melody. But they don't really think about the environment in which it was recorded, which is so important. It's that thing that determines what the album sounds like.

There's nothing I'd rather do than make music. It's the love of my life.

I've experienced great things, I've experienced great tragedies. I've done almost everything I could possibly ever imagine doing, but I just know that there's more.

Being in Nirvana was amazing an experience that will never happen again for me. And I look on them as some of the best and worst times of my life.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

There's a big difference between falling in love with someone and falling in love with someone and getting married. Usually, after you get married, you fall in love with the person even more.

When you're thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.

What's the last thing a drummer says in a band? 'Hey guys, why don't we try one of my songs?'

What we feel most comfortable doing is playing loud, screaming rock songs.

It's not until recently that I could even imagine myself as an adult. But these kids today, they look at me like I'm Neil Young. Nirvana is the band their parents listen to.

It was supposed to be gross, and now it's gorgeous.

We only do what feels right. If something feels forced or contrived, then we pull back. We remain the Foo Fighters.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

I'd love it if everyone knew one Foo Fighters song.

It's terrifying to play your favorite band's song in front of your favorite band.

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.

Sharing music is not a crime. It shouldn't be. There should be a deeper meaning to making music than just selling downloads.

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. It's not about being perfect, it's not about sounding absolutely correct, it's not about what goes on in a computer. It's about what goes on in here [your heart] and what goes on in here [your head].

If you're trying to connect to people with music - it's more of an outward process and a lot of times musicians can be very inward.

Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap - and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and 'Heart Shaped Box' and stuff on 'In Utero' just happened that way.

CBGB represents a lot to New York City and to underground rock and to new wave and post-punk and whatever. But, you know, it's like tearing down the Jefferson Memorial or something.

We just do what we always do. We play shows and go home and rest and then play more shows.

I'm so not macho. It's crazy. My man cave is so not a man cave.

From the time that 'Nevermind' came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

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 you're young, you're not afraid of what comes next. You're excited by it.

When there's so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you've already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days?

It's funny, there aren't too many musicians that also moonlight as studio engineers. There's a few - the really brilliant ones.

One of the great things about Taylor Hawkins is his…shirtless body, really.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you're moved by the fact that it's real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like 'Let It Be' or 'Long and Winding Road' or a song like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Roxanne,' any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

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.

Everybody now thinks that Nashville is the coolest city in America.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it's just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

The whole slacker generation totally didn't apply to us musically.

If you were to sit me down in a classroom, with fluorescent lights humming and some woman trying to teach me Italian, there's no way. But scream goes to Italy, we stay in a squat, and the only way you can ask someone where to take a piss is to do it in Italian. So I learned Italian.

My first instrument was actually the trombone, but that didn't last long. Soon I was playing guitar in bands from the time I was 11 or 12.

There are times when I feel like I'm a traveling minister. I'm trying to go out and get kids to pick-up yard sale instruments and change the world.

I think musicians like me are drawn to those older desks, not just because they're legend and lore but also because they do something really specific that is hard to emulate or re-create digitally.

When you're sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

My whole life, I have listened to people like Neil Young, or Crosby, Stills & Nash, and artists that have made a career out of the mellow, folky, acoustic dynamic.

Some Kind Of Monster' is such a nightmare for any musician to watch because you're watching a band be honest to each other. Not a good idea, man!

Be someone's light when they are hopeless.

The most important thing for me is my family, and my health and happiness, and making sure everyone's cool.

I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it's changed generations of people.

There's a band in a garage right now writing songs for an album that will do the same thing 'Nevermind' did some 20 years ago. We don't know who and where, but it will f***ing happen again. All it takes is for that storm to break.

When Nirvana became popular, you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors - old friends, family.

How come drummers leave their drumsticks on the dashboard of their car? So they can park in the handicapped spaces.

What I really miss these days in music - is the music. I prefer to listen to melodies and songs, not just sounds.

Going out and playing music - that's what I do. I don't do much else.

With this record [The Colour and the Shape], I started taking the lyrics more seriously. This is a very personal album.

A lot of people from my generation of music are so focused on playing things correctly or to perfection that they're stuck in that safe place.

When something good comes your way, you better feel fortunate, because it doesn't last forever.

I think actually singing the words is more therapeutic than just sitting down to write them, because then you are letting it out, and it's coming from your gut.

I once received a cape that was made from the little purple bags that Crown Royal Whisky comes in.

Develop that individuality by working as hard as you can at what you love.

I'm a skinny, geeky, high school dropout - it works, kids! Sensitive guys always get the girl. You'll get laid 10 times as much as that guy on the football team 'cause he's on steroids and he's gonna get fat.

I'm kind of claustrophobic... It's not even like enclosed spaces. It's like I hate being stuck in one band, you know? Just being stuck is the biggest drag, for fear that, you know, just that you can't get out.

It's tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I'm wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.

Someone curating songs for you through your computer or being able to hold 10,000 songs on your watch - that convenience is pretty incredible, but so is the emotional impact of holding a Beatles record in your hand and listening to Let It Be.

Who's to say what's a good voice and not a good voice?

When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.

Always have the highest bar for yourself.

Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.

If there's one thing I'm good at, it's gathering people together to do something fun.

At school where you a dunce or a teacher's pet? All of the above. I was stupid so they thought I was cute.

The fact that I'm virtually deaf. Any woman who's going to date a rock musician has to be prepared to repeat herself every 10 seconds. My wife asks me where we should go for dinner and it sounds like the schoolteacher from Charlie Brown.

Rock stars are like sports stars: If you snap your ankle, you're done.

Ramones or AC/DC are two bands that have managed to keep their signature sound and their signature formula for years and years and album after album after album, without it seeming like a dead-end street.

To me the most important thing is getting into a studio and making an album that is 12 or 14 amazing songs, getting up onstage, and making people happy by livening the rock.

It's a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that's a good thing. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn't be as much fun.

The best time for gum is just before getting onstage. I need a minty-fresh microphone.

I'm not like a voracious hoarder who has 50,000 albums of vinyl stacked in a storage space in the San Fernando Valley. But I do have albums from the last 40 years of my life.

There's nothing better than having a bottle of beer in your hand in the waves.

Dude, maybe not everyone loves 'Glee.' Me included. I watched 10 minutes and it wasn't my thing.

To women, drummers seem like these adorable, sexy Neanderthals, and lead singers seem mysterious and dangerous. So while the lead singers all want to be David Bowie, floating into parties and being the center of attention, it's the drummers who are in the corner doing keg stands and breaking tables. Usually it's the drummers who get the fun-loving ladies and the singers who get the nutcases.

I'm not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

When I sit down to interview people, I don't hold questions and I don't know the answers. They're more like conversations that become lessons.

I love everything about my job, except being away from the kids.

When you're recording to tape, you usually just settle for what you have. There's not a lot of options to manipulate the performance.

Most of our songs were written on acoustic guitar before they made it to the practice stage.

I guess it was exciting that every time I pulled up to the gate of my house, I wondered if someone was going to jump out of the bush and stab me in the face.

When it comes to making an album I take that very seriously. I am meticulous, overworked. That's my time to put everything under the microscope.

It's nice when people are happy to hear that you're still alive, rather than feeling like "Oh, finally he's dead?"

For every Foo Fighters record, we've had two or three beautiful, acoustic-based songs, but they never usually make their way to the record, because we want to make rock records.

I had a Super Grover doll growing up. Super Grover was very clumsy, he wasn't very good-looking. But in his own way he'd always save the day.

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.