There are 20 seconds, if that, in Foo Fighters’ most popular song that are bound to trigger anyone who absolutely loathes whispering.
The moment that will get misophonics gnashing their teeth is the sound of Dave Grohl softly talking into a lo-fi microphone towards the end of the song. The compressed recording sounds like a whispered secret trapped in soft waves of static, yet perfectly suits the mood of the track.
Grohl began writing the song while the Foo Fighters were recording their future single Monkey Wrench at Washington’s Bear Creek Studios at the tail-end of 1996.
He’d been served divorce papers by his wife Jennifer Youngblood’s lawyers at Christmas and spent the holidays at home in Virginia. The song demanded to be finished.
“I was sort of in the middle of this intense emotional period,” he explained 24 years later. “And for whatever reason, the emotion or the feeling I got when I would play [Everlong’s] succession of chords sort of touched on whatever emotion that was.”
He asked Gray Matter frontman Geoff Turner if he could use his WGNS studio so he could record a demo of the song.
“Without having it fully formed, I put down a drum track, the guitars and the bass, and sang it into a microphone for the first time,” explained Grohl. “The lyric and the melody, and where I was emotionally, it all made sense.”
Grohl was “deathly afraid” that he’d inadvertently ripped off Sonic Youth on his latest composition. After playing the rough version to Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, they responded with “Why is that a demo? Why isn’t that on the album?”. Buoyed by their encouragement, the song made it onto the album.
The lyrics were inspired by a romance with Veruca Salt’s Louise Post. But in the bridge towards the climax of the song, there’s that static-filled spoken word section. The original version was based on a dream Post had.
“I sang these back-ups over the phone at 2am after being woken up from a deep sleep in Chicago by DG who was tracking the vocals for Everlong in LA,” Post wrote on Instagram. “He wanted me to sing the doo-doo’s, which were inspired by our song Shimmer Like a Girl. While I was at it, I wrote a harmony for the chorus and sang that too. The whispered section of this song was originally the dream I was having when the phone rang. It was a dream about us. He later removed it and replaced [it] with his own whispers, one [of] which was a love letter to me.”
Bradley Cook, who is credited with recording all the songs on The Colour and the Shape, told Produce Like a Pro host Warren Huart about the process of creating that crackly, mysterious section and what was used on the final version.
“The assistant Ryan Boesch told us a story where his dad would come home from his night job and he had to sleep in the daytime,” he revealed. “When he and his brother were too loud, his dad would give them military punishment and have them hold boots at the foot of his bed, hold them up while he slept. That’s Dave retelling the story.”
The whispered passage is: “So, dad would take the Sundays off and that’s the only time he could ever get any rest. And so, because we were loud on Sundays, he’d make us hold his construction boots over our head, ’til he’d sleep. They were really heavy boots and I used to say, ‘Dad, come on, please’ and like start crying, ’cause they’re too heavy…”
“There was some book around, I don’t know if it was a tech book or something. We did three tracks,” continues Cook. “There was Ryan’s story and a couple of tracks of him reading from a random book.”
Only the studio assistant’s story about heavy boots was used in the final mix. It was later discovered that the “random book” was about the original Neve 8028 recording console from Sound City Studios, on which Nirvana recorded Nevermind in 1991.
Grohl eventually purchased he console for his own Studio 606 in Northridge, California and was moved to make his own documentary about Sound City in 2013.
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