Musician

When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.

When there's so much left to do, why spend your time focusing on things you've already done, counting trophies or telling stories about the good old days?

Mick Fleetwood was one of my first interviews. And if you've ever talked to that dude, he's the sweetest guy in the world - he's just a trip.

Some people record onto tape, and then they pay for the tape, and download those onto a hard drive. Initially in a Pro Tools program. Other people go straight into digital, and use no tape at all.

When Nirvana became popular, you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors - old friends, family.

When I listen to the radio, I just hear so much music that doesn't even sound like people. The vocals are all tuned, and the drums are all fake.

People are so into digital recording now they forgot how easy analog recording can be.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can't let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn't even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn't a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn't want to have some contrived composition.

I've always been a fan of melody and emotional melancholy, whether it was Rites of Spring or Tears for Fears or Neil Young. If I hear a song that has a sweet melody, I'm a sucker for it, whether it's Linkin Park or Little Richard.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it's just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It's inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

Who's to say what's a good voice and not a good voice?

Usually, when you go in to make a record, you have 30 songs, and you record 30 of them, and 12 of them make it to the record.

The whole slacker generation totally didn't apply to us musically.

I didn't start sweating until I had children. That was one of the first things I realized when my daughter Violet was born - I started getting wicked BO. You know there's a difference between basketball BO and stress BO? This was definitely stress BO. Like, new dad BO.

I'd love it if everyone knew one Foo Fighters song.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that's stripped down.

I never needed much, and I never thought I'd get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.

Whenever I say I made a record in the garage, people just assume that I have, like, a Lear jet parked in there or something. But really there's old luggage, a couple of bikes. It's big enough to put one minivan in. That's it. No dartboard. I'm so not macho.