“Not every song has to be Imagine by John Lennon”: How one piece of advice changed Dave Grohl’s approach to songwriting foreverIn light of the release of the Foo Fighters’ latest record, Your Favourite Toy, Dave Grohl has imparted his ultimate songwriting tip – there’s no way every single track you write will go down in history as an earth-shatteringly monumental moment in musical history. And that’s absolutely fine.
Speaking on the Tape Notes podcast, the Foo Fighters frontman explains that it can be “liberating” to remove the pressure of writing a commercial smash hit, a revelation he discovered following a conversation with bassist Nate Mendel. “On the fourth record, I was stuck on a lyric and I was wasting everyone’s time,” Grohl recalls. “Everyone was downstairs waiting for me, but I was on a blank page, uninspired… And Nate says, ‘You know, not every song has to be Imagine by John Lennon.’”

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Rather than labouring for hours over writing a track as timeless as Imagine, Mendel insisted that Grohl should start by “just writing SOMETHING”, even if just to get the creative ball rolling. “It was really liberating,” the frontman says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to write Imagine today? Great!”
The advice re-framed his creative outlook so greatly that Grohl even considered writing an essay about the approach. It would centre on being creative just for the sake of being creative – because, if you’re only writing to make a ‘hit’, it not only limits your output, but it also begs the question of why you’re even writing in the first place. “I was going to write this whole piece on why people [feel the need to] write songs,” he says.

In terms of lyrical advice, Grohl also notes that you should never compare yourself to other lyricists, as your work should always come from the heart. “Lyrics are subjective – they’re up to one’s own personal interpretation,” he says. “There’s some lyrics that I’ll read from other artists [that I think are] kind of nonsense. [But] that person is decoding some sort of emotion within themselves. No matter how quickly or how much thought they put into it, it’s revealing in some way.”
He also notes that lingering for too long on a project can sometimes be detrimental. “A problem that I’ve had in the past is self-editing to the point of losing the original intent…” he notes. “When you just do something quickly, with no self-editing, that can often be the most revealing. There’s a lot of this, that on this record.”
“As we dig through the tracks and listen to stuff, I’m constantly finding new meaning or new depth that I may not have considered before,” he concludes. “You know, I’m not the type of person that’s going to walk around with a journal and a bottle of red wine sitting in the park and writing an endless tome of fucking poetry. But, but when I have to, I will.”
Your Favourite Toy is out now.

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