Session Information
With four months of work scrapped amid massive tensions within the band, the future of Foo Fighters was uncertain in the Spring of 2002. No clear plans were in place for what the band was going to do next, everyone “taking a break”. The latest recruit to the band Chris Shiflett was in the dark, wondering if his tenure with the band would be short-lived. “Wait, are we breaking up? Is that what this means, like ‘taking a break’ is a nice way of saying breaking up?”
There was no clear roadmap for the future of Foo Fighters in place and Dave Grohl soon went off to join desert rockers Queens Of The Stone age. “I’ve known them for years and they invited me to play on this record. It’s great music to play drums to. They’re amazing live and they needed a drummer, so I thought I’d do it.” Grohl saw himself back in the role of being ‘just’ the drummer in a band once again, out of the spotlight. “It’s really about just playing the drums. I feel much more comfortable and confident doing this than trying to sing every night,” revealed Grohl.
Despite Chris’ concerns, Dave Grohl was in fact not ready to call it a day with Foo Fighters. When a short break appeared in the Queen's schedule, he reached out an olive branch to Taylor Hawkins. “I had this two-week period that was, like, downtime, so I called Taylor and said, ‘hey, why don't you and I go to Virginia and record some shit? I have a couple of new ideas.” Hawkins agreed but rather than going back to Virginia the pair convened at Hawkins’ home studio in California, hoping to be able to move the band forward.
According to Hawkins, the pair demoed five or six new songs at his house, including ‘Low’, ‘Times Like These’ and ‘Disenchanted Lullaby’. “They were just instrumentals,” said Grohl of the recordings. “I wasn't really concerned with making the rest of the record. It was just, like, 'okay, let's get back into just fucking around, how about that? Let's just do it, because I live 25 minutes away from you, and I can come up to your house and we can put something to tape for fun.'“
Three of the six songs would go on to be recorded with the rest of the band and ultimately released on the album ‘One By One’, however, none of these instrumental demos have ever been released publicly.