Composition
The double album has a disk of rock songs and another with acoustic ones, which Grohl said demonstrated his artistic freedom - "It's not one specific genre of music, it's not one specific style. I'm just a musician. I can play all these different instruments, I can write a bossa nova, I can write a thrash tune." He also stated that he tried to fit the Foo Fighters sound even with stylistic differences: "It's still the same four guys playing it so it just is a Foo Fighters song, whether it sounds like Carcass or fucking Ry Cooder."
The band tried to do the albums without a "middle ground" sound, with "the acoustic record far more delicate and beautiful and atmospheric", and "the rock CD far more brutal and aggressive" than their previous work. The arrangements were aiming for complexity - "This record is much more elaborate than just an acoustic guitar and a vocal. And the songs were written to hold more orchestration. We've never had accordions and pump organs and cellos and stand up bass." The acoustic guitar sound has influences of Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson, with open notes in conjunction with fretted notes.
The lyrics on the rock album tried to focus on "general themes that everyone can get their hands on", while the acoustic had introspective lyrics that are "vulnerable and revealing", with things Grohl "wouldn't say out loud, wouldn't even admit to myself." Grohl declared that "when you're writing songs that have a sort of anthemic quality, you can't really go lighthearted and sing about bullshit. You have to dig into a deeper place to find the words", and that "I don't know what it is about, this album, that makes it sound more heartfelt or deeper or more emotional, but when I listen to it, it really is." These include "Friend of a Friend", a song which Grohl wrote in the 1990s about himself and his former Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain during the time they shared an apartment together in 1990, and "Still", talking about a suicide Grohl saw when he was ten in Virginia, by a boy who jumped on the train tracks. Much of the album's theme and content, including the title, came after Grohl spent time on the campaign trail with John Kerry during the 2004 presidential election. "We'd pull in to small towns, and thousands of people would come to be rescued by this man," said Grohl. "It's not a political record, but what I saw inspired me."
Read more about this topic: In Your Honor
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)