Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace - Composition

Composition

Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace offers a mix of both electric and acoustic songs, which Grohl likened to the band growing older and "comfortable with all kinds of music" instead of just focusing on straight rock songs, saying that listening to the album he felt like "we've gotten over our insecurities, because it presents us in a way that we probably hid in the past." Grohl also stated that "the idea now is to step up and make Odessey and Oracle" - the album he claimed to have listened the most during production - and that "it has always been my dream to mix Steely Dan with Nomeansno." Amidst the amount of heavier tracks and themes Grohl decided to include the song "Cheer Up, Boys (Your Make Up Is Running)", described as "the most light-hearted, melodic song of all" which "seemed like a little ray of hope in the middle of all this despair." Grohl added that there was a bigger focus on melodies even in heavier tracks such as "The Pretender", "Let It Die" and "Erase/Replace", and that album closer "Home", a ballad featuring Grohl on the piano, was "the best song I've ever written".

The songs of the album are noted for their changing dynamics - with "middle sections turn into this mass orchestrated swarm and ridiculous time signatures" which include musical references to 1970s soft rock bands such as the Wings, Eagles and Bread - summed by Hawkins by saying the band "wanted to make sure that everything 'built' on this record, that each instrument started somewhere and went somewhere else in the course of a song". The drummer attributed this to the acoustic tour leading the band to "shed some of the fear of incorpo­rating mellower stuff with the heavy stuff", and Grohl added that "we wanted the stops to be pin-drop silent before exploding. If we had a beautiful melody, we'd throw a fucking string quartet in there. So we did everything we could to really magnify all those elements and that was fun. Usually you have a few parameters you're afraid to pass but, this time, there was no fear of going too far." Mix engineer Rich Costey added that his work of "preserve what had done to a fairly large degree" with "balancing and rides to get the dynamics to happen" was difficult given the sonic variety of Echoes, which went from " endless walls of guitar overdubs, almost like a swarm of bees" to string quartets: "The challenge of this type of mix is to retain the power of the track, yet define a space for everything."

"Most people think the world begins with their birth and ends with their death, but at some point your realise there's a much larger world out there that will continue existing long after you have made your exit. So I started to take in the big picture, and these realisations had an influence on the new album. There are songs about birth, death and life because my perception of these things has changed radically."

As the acoustic tour made Grohl realize "we were making music worth listening to, rather than music made for pummelling the person next to you" he decided to give more importance to the lyrics and "have a connection with the crowd in front of us", considering that among the many compositions the band made on pre-production "the ones that stand out are the ones that say something". So for the first time the lyrics started being written before recording begun, with Grohl stating that he "sat in the back of the studio and just wrote every day for about 14 hours a day." Most of the lyrics of the album deal with themes of birth, death and life, which Grohl attributed to the birth of his daughter Violet, considering that having a child "changes your entire outlook on the world", and that he was suddenly more emotional - "So when you're writing music with that in mind or that in your heart, everything just blooms into this fucking incredibly colourful, colourful feeling." Helped by the extensive lyrical preparation, the lyrics also tried to show more of Grohl's feelings, "those things that you've always wanted to do or always wanted to say", with Hawkins adding that he could not listen to "Stranger Things Have Happened" as "I'm one of his best friends, and the last thing I want to do is read a love letter to his wife or whoever it is."