(Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Thu 29 January 2026 22:20, UK
Any artist trying to do it all will always be standing in the shadow of what Dave Grohl has done for the last 30 years.
He may have been the quiet one when he was still playing with Nirvana, but as soon as he struck out on his own with Foo Fighters, he wanted to work on every single piece of rock and roll music that he could. That could be playing with Queens of the Stone Age or watching one of his own classics come to life, but he felt that some of the true musical Renaissance artists tended to fly a bit more under the radar than most.
Then again, a lot of Grohl’s favourite bands weren’t exactly meant to be the biggest artists in the world. No one is sitting around wondering why a band like Fugazi didn’t get big or why The Replacements never managed to become the darlings of rock radio. Their music wasn’t designed for the mainstream, but that didn’t mean that Grohl couldn’t take a few lessons from what people like Ian MacKaye had to say.
If anything, those lessons were all the more important once he reached the mainstream. Not everyone gets the chance to be in the spotlight for that long, but Grohl wasn’t about to waste it once he started gaining traction with Foo Fighters. He wanted to be practical, and the only way that he could keep himself busy was to work with as many bands as he could in the meantime. But while Taylor Hawkins and Nate Mendel brought something special to the group when they joined, Grohl could have easily called the Foos a solo project if he wanted.
Sure, the band might be the one that plays all the songs whenever they perform live, but the skeleton of every song is in Grohl’s mind before anyone plays a single note of music. And if you look at how he made the lion’s share of the band’s debut record completely by himself, he seemed to be ahead of the game when it came to the DIY aesthetic that was happening just a few years later.
Jack White would be doing the exact same thing when making those first White Stripes records, but Brendan Benson was always far more interesting for Grohl to watch. This was someone who had the same rootsy sound that White would later be playing, but when he saw the amount of effort that Benson put into his records and the live show, Grohl felt that he was looking at one of the finest musicians that he had seen in a long time.
Whereas a lot of rock bands make the best of their imperfections, Grohl felt that Benson had enough talent for three different musicians judging by how he conducted himself, saying, “A guy by the name of Brendan Benson who has not released his record yet, but I swear to God, it’s the most amazing thing, it’s like Black Francis has handed down his crown to this guy. He’s still working, he goes backwards and forwards for a really long time and he’s one of the most talented guys I’ve heard in a really long time. It’s totally refreshing.”
Granted, this also wasn’t the first time that Grohl was ahead of the curve in many respects. Josh Homme may have been one of the founding fathers of Queens of the Stone Age, but even in his Nirvana days, Grohl was already talking about what Homme was doing with Kyuss on Blues for the Red Sun, so it wasn’t like he couldn’t figure out when someone was at the top of their game musically.
So while Benson might not have had an outlet in the mainstream as much as Grohl did with Foo Fighters, having Grohl call him a legend is much more than simple lip service. Here is someone who could make an entire record by himself and get it on the radio within a matter of days, but that only came from trying to match what people like Benson could do.
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