Session Information
Foo Fighters began their world tour for fifth album ‘In Your Honor’ in May 2005 with a series of promotional shows at home in the United States as well as in Europe and Australia. A series of festival appearances were booked in July including a performance at the T-In The Park festival in Scotland, United Kingdom. On the day of their headline performance Dave Grohl was also scheduled to be interviewed for BBC Radio Scotland, as well as perform a song acoustically. Rather than pull out an old hit such as ‘Everlong’ or ‘Times Like These’ Grohl revealed he would be performing a brand-new song he’d written very recently.
“I just finished writing it ten minutes ago,” he told the DJ. “It’s called Skin and Bones”.The band performed their full set later that night and following one further show the following night, returned home to the United States with a break of just over a fortnight before their next tour date.
Wasting no time Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins headed to Studio 606, wanting to make a quick studio recording of the new song before heading back on the road. Owing to the impromptu nature of recording neither Chris Shiflett nor Nate Mendel was present.
The song was recorded live with a single guitar track, the sound of Grohl sliding his fingers up and down the frets very clear throughout. With Mendel not around Grohl himself recorded a simple bass track before Hawkins added an equally simple, relaxed drum track. Grohl finished the song off with a couple of vocal takes and the recording was complete. As well as recording Dave's new song Taylor also wanted to record a cover whilst they had some free time, the Cream song 'I Feel Free'.
The session was recorded by Mike Terry who had recently helped engineer the recording sessions for 'In Your Honor'. Terry was surprised at how quickly both songs were recorded and in particular the Cream song, as Dave didn’t really know the song well. “Dave came in that morning, learned the guitar part and they banged it out together. He learned the bass part and overdubbed it, then he learned the solo and even doubled it”, Terry said of the speedy recording.
Both songs were recorded in a single day and then mixed by Terry the following day. The two tracks were also released quite hastily, first appearing as B-Sides on the ‘DOA’ single in September 2005.
