Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace - Background and Recording

Background and Recording

The tour for the Foo Fighters' fifth album, In Your Honor, had both acoustic and electric shows to fit the song variety in that record. Frontman Dave Grohl discussed this with RCA Music Group president Clive Davis, on how "it'd be so cool" if the Foo Fighters were the band that did those different shows that appealed to specific audiences "and they wouldn't necessarily have to go to both", to which Davis replied that "you can do both together". Grohl took this advice when composing his following album. Grohl added that "we didn't plan the new album to be half rock and half acoustic", picking the songs the band considered the best, with "demos which ranged from psycho fucking Nomeansno to sloppy, Tom Petty country to fucking piano-driven songs".

"We haven't been ready to write a record like this until now. I know that Dave wouldn't have been comfortable putting violins on a song before. But for whatever reasons, it just felt like the right time to explore those things now. The last record, obviously, was half heavy stuff, half acoustic songs. So it really was like two sides of the coin. It sounds obvious, but this time around we weren't afraid of incorporating everything into one song if it felt right."

Since Grohl felt the songs were different from the band's previous input and "had the potential to be something great", he considered that instead of doing something like the last three albums, the band had to go out of "our own comfort zone" and "needed someone to push us out of there". So Grohl decided to work again with Gil Norton, who produced the band's second album The Colour and the Shape, citing how Norton taught the band of the importance of pre-production and refining the composition, and claiming Norton's "unconventional" approach "seems to capture the best of this band", considering that with him "we're not going to do a straightforward AC/DC record, he's gonna make it different".

Preparation was extensive: first Grohl had his usual start-off by developing demos with drummer Taylor Hawkins, but for the first time Grohl tried to input vocals and lyrics in this early composition stage. After rounding up composition with guitarist Chris Shiflett and bassist Nate Mendel, Grohl spent two weeks with Norton discussing "arrangements, harmony and melody" and reducing the song ideas, and then the band spent four weeks rehearsing, playing "a song a day, from noon to midnight". Hawkins stated that "we basically played each of these songs 100 different times, trying every little thing every different way" and that it was the first time since The Colour and the Shape "that Dave had to deal with someone in the room questioning all his ideas", given how condescending previous producer Nick Raskulinecz was. Grohl claimed the choices were for the "most powerful, dramatic songs", and that there was an effort to "make everything sound as natural as possible - just like on the albums we grew up listening to", citing 1970s artists such as Neil Young and Wings as a major influence. Shiflett added that for the first time he played lead guitar in some tracks while Grohl "usually works out all the bits" of composition.

Recording begun on March 2007 at the band's own Studio 606 in Northridge, California. As the band took a ten day break in April, Grohl thought that the record needed another uptempo song, so he spent his time developing an unfinished song that became "The Pretender". The sessions wrapped in mid-June, and for the first time the band did not feel the need to rerecord any song. Grohl stated that while In Your Honor was a double album because he felt "schizophrenic" to alternate between loud and acoustic songs, Norton helped on sequencing the tracks into "an album that makes sense".

The album features the Foo Fighters' first instrumental, "Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners". It was written by Grohl after meeting with one of the miners involved in the Beaconsfield mine collapse who requested an iPod with In Your Honor in it during the incident. As Grohl was moved by this action, he decided to "write something just to dedicate to him that night because he definitely seemed like a hero", and later promised to include the instrumental on the album. The album version features Kaki King, whom Grohl invited to record the song as she was visiting Studio 606. Grohl later said that "I showed it to her once, and she shredded 10 times better than I ever played it".