In Your Honor - Background

Background

After touring in support of One by One, Dave Grohl was uncertain on what to do next with the Foo Fighters. He felt that rushing to do another record would not be creatively rewarding. Grohl considered a possible film score, and began writing acoustic songs, eventually amassing a full album's worth of songs. Grohl, not wanting to make a solo album and accepting the drift from his usual style, brought the songs to the Foo Fighters - "who's to say what we should sound like?" -. Bassist Nate Mendel replied that the songs' uncharacteristic sound was "why should go on the record." Grohl decided against an acoustic record, saying "I have to have loud rock music in my life somewhere", and decided to make a double album, with "one CD that's all the really heavy rock shit" and another "that's really beautiful, acoustic-based, lower dynamic stuff", which Grohl described as “the bottle and the hangover”, and also with the rock record being "my Jack and Coke record" with songs that "I realise I cannot live without that", and the acoustic being "my Sapphire-and-Martini-with-Kylie record". Grohl also stated a decisive moment in making a double album was uploading demos to his computer and realizing he had five hours of music, adding that "we've been a band for 10 years now, this is our fifth record, and I thought it would be boring to just keep making album after album and making videos and playing festivals, so I wanted to do something special."

The album was recorded in a new recording studio built in a warehouse in Northridge, California, named Studio 606 West in contrast to the original Studio 606 in Grohl's basement in Alexandria, Virginia. Development for In Your Honor took nine months with three and a half months installing equipment in the studio, and songs being written throughout 2004. While waiting for 606 to get finished, the band rehearsed on North Hollywood's Mates Rehearsal Studios, where "we ended up with three or four different versions of about 30 songs”, according to Raskulinecz who added that "it got to the point where I didn't want them to play the rock songs anymore. I was afraid they were going to get stale.”