Top 66 Dave Grohl Quotes

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

Joining a band without ever having really met the people before, you just want to be musically powerful.

And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I’d go back to Virginia.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

There are times when I feel like I’m a traveling minister. I’m trying to go out and get kids to pick-up yard sale instruments and change the world.

I think people should feel encouraged to be themselves.

I stopped doing drugs when I was 20. I was finished with drugs before Nirvana even started.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‘Heart Shaped Box’ and stuff on ‘In Utero’ just happened that way.

I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, ‘I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,’ and I actually meant it.

At 13 years old, I realized I could start my own band. I could write my own song, I could record my own record. I could start my own label. I could release my own record. I could book my own shows. I could write and publish my own fanzine. I could silk-screen my own T-shirt. I could do this all myself.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

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

Chicago gave me more music than any other city in America.

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

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands. I had posters on my wall. I had Beatles records.

I think my biggest musical hero growing up was probably Ian MacKaye. He set a great example for all of us local musicians. Still, to this day, I see him as the best example of a right-on musician.

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.

I’m kind of claustrophobic… It’s not even like enclosed spaces. It’s like I hate being stuck in one band, you know? Just being stuck is the biggest drag, for fear that, you know, just that you can’t get out.

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.

I love to play. And fortunately, I don’t know a lot of musicians that suck. I know a bunch of really good ones, and they’re always up for playing.

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I’d just go back to Virginia.

No one has any faith in the tape anymore – everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don’t. I think an analog tape is something you can hold.

When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine – it kinda sucks the life out of music.

When you’re young, you’re not afraid of what comes next. You’re excited by it.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

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

I’ve experienced great things, I’ve experienced great tragedies. I’ve done almost everything I could possibly ever imagine doing, but I just know that there’s more.

A lot of the records you buy, there’s nothing you can hold in your hand, it’s all 1’s and 0’s, this digital cloud floating in the ether. but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand.

Give me something to assemble, I won’t look at the directions, I’ll try to figure it out by myself. It’s why I love Ikea furniture.

I’m not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

I know a lot of people who wouldn’t be comfortable with everything that comes with being in a band as big as Nirvana. The thing that I don’t understand is not appreciating that simple gift of being able to play music.

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.

When digital technology started becoming the norm, you’ve got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won’t last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument – learning to do your craft – that’s the most important thing! It’s not about what goes on in a computer!

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

There’s something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that ‘Everlong’ is on it, or ‘Best of You’ is on it, and it’s really special.

When you’re thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.

Ladies and gentlemen, god bless America – land of the free, home of the brave.

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it’s not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That’s how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be a 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.

A lot of people from my generation of music are so focused on playing things correctly or to perfection that they’re stuck in that safe place.

It’s funny; recently I’ve started to notice people’s impersonations of me, and it’s basically like a hyperactive child.

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.

There’s always gonna be rock n’ roll bands, there’s always gonna be kids that love rock n’ roll records, and there will always be rock n’ roll.

I have crazy claustrophobic dreams, weird elevator dreams where the elevator closes in and all of a sudden I am lying down – oh my God, it’s a casket. Just freaky stuff like that.

There’s a big difference between falling in love with someone and falling in love with someone and getting married. Usually, after you get married, you fall in love with the person even more.

I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.

From the time that ‘Nevermind’ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

Wow, I get to wake up again? Ok. You have to make good with what you’ve got.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

Because you have things like ‘American Idol’ and you’ve got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it’s easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

Cause when you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

In this day and age, when you can use a machine or computer to simulate or emulate what people can do together, it still can’t replace the magic of four people in a room playing.

It’s a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that’s a good thing.

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?

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

I love everything about my job, except being away from the kids.

No, there’s something about the sing-song cadence of children’s music that has its place in rock.

From one generation to the next, The Beatles will remain the most important rock band of all time.

Actually, I didn’t start sweating until I had children.