Foo Fighters (album) - Composition

Composition

Nine of the songs in the album were composed before or during Grohl's tenure with Nirvana, and existed in demos created by Grohl on his home 8-track tape recorder. The only compositions done after Cobain's death were "This Is a Call", "I'll Stick Around", "X-Static" and "Wattershed". The music mostly followed a hard rock sound with the soft-loud dynamics seen in Nirvana tracks such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Heart-Shaped Box". Variants include the melancholic "Exhausted", which Grohl defined as a song that's "sad but makes you feel good".

Most of the lyrics in Foo Fighters are nonsensical lines written by Grohl in the twenty minutes before recording began. As the frontman, Grohl explained, "I had seven days to record fifteen songs. I was just concentrating on everything being as together as possible, having everything be tight and in sync. There wasn't too much time spent sitting in a chair thinking." Grohl would add that the gibberish was deliberate, given that, "there was too much to say," following Cobain's death and, "a lot of emphasis placed on the meaning of the first Foo Fighters album." The musician still considered that "the things you write down spur of the moment are most revealing. Now I look at them and some of them seem to actually have meaning." and revealed that a few songs have lyrics inspired by "personal experiences of the last four or five years", with the standout being "Big Me", an "out-and-out love song" to Grohl's then-wife Jennifer Youngblood that he described as his favorite track on the album. Contrasting with the aggressive and rebellious themes of Nirvana, Grohl had positive and cheery tunes such as "This Is a Call", defined as "a 'hello' and a 'thank you'" to everyone that had played a key role in Grohl's life; the playful "For All the Cows"; and "Wattershed", with a title referencing Mike Watt and lyrics that described Grohl's "love of hardcore and old school punk rock".