Top 15 Taylor Hawkins Quotes

I only started playing piano because I had chickenpox when I was about 14 and wasn’t allowed to play my drums for a whole week… We had a piano in the house, so I just sat down and played that instead.

The one thing I do know is that I’m the best Taylor Hawkins drummer there is, and that is all I can hope to be. And when it comes to music, musicianship and skill, there is no such thing as better or worse because so much is personal opinion, and I can see that now.

The records that I grew up listening to had feel, and the drummers that inspired me – like Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Phil Collins and Roger Taylor – all had their own voice and individual style.

I’ve been lucky enough to have fulfilled so many ambitions, and gone way past anything I ever thought I would do. I could never have imagined the career that I’ve had with the Foo Fighters – playing stadiums and having songs on the radio. It’s amazing, and my goal is really just to carry on playing.

I don’t like guitar solos that are like, ‘Look at me, look at me!’ I like guitar solos that are little songs within the songs.

I’m not trying to be the next Dave Grohl or Phil Collins.

I don’t take breaks, man. In the past, I used to spend my free time getting in trouble, and now I spend it working on my music. If I’m not playing drums with my cover band, Chevy Metal, I’m working on songs for myself.

I’ve worked hard, but this business can be tough, and I just consider myself incredibly lucky to have had the career that I have, and to still be having so much fun playing drums and making music.

Life is funny. If you don’t laugh, you’re in trouble.

In the studio you can auto tune vocals, and with drums, you can put them on a grid and make them perfect. I hate that sound. When someone hands me a record and the drums are perfectly gridded and the vocals are perfectly auto tuned, I throw it out the window. I have no interest in rock music being like that.

I think that debut albums are supposed to sound sort of raw. You don’t want to record ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ as your first album, because where do you go from there?

I don’t have perfect pitch. My drums sound like a drummer, not a drum machine.

In hindsight, if I could go back in time and relay a message to my younger self, I would tell him to work on his time keeping, and that the job of a drummer is not to be the one that gets noticed the most on stage, or to be the fastest, or the loudest. Above all, it is to be the timekeeper.

The Alanis Morissette tour, everybody thinks that was all sitting around, lighting candles and talking intelligently about synergy and big words. That band was so gnarly. We were such scumbags. Alanis had no idea. We were like Van Halen.

I used to dress like Roger Taylor when I was ten because I thought he was cool. In high school, I used to dress like Stephen Perkins from Jane’s Addiction because I thought he was cool. You just want to be those guys when you’re that age.