Foo Fighters is a band filled with tremendous artists, but the way Dave Grohl sees it, one of them stands out above the others as “the most accomplished musician in the band.” In a new oral history about the group from EW, Grohl said, “Chris [Shiflett] is, without a doubt, the most accomplished musician in the band. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t joined.”
Ahead of their 10th studio album, Foo Fighters reflects on their highs, lows, whoas — and how they'd like to go out. https://t.co/cBSmu1MhiE
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) February 3, 2021
While Shiflett is best known for his work with Foo Fighters (which he joined after the release of 1999’s There Is Nothing Left To Lose), he maintains an active musical presence outside of the band. He has released five albums as part of the supergroup cover band Me First And The Gimme Gimmes, although he has since left the group. He has also put out two albums with his band Jackson United, two more with his band Chris Shiflett & The Dead Peasants, and a pair of solo albums, the latest of which, Hard Lessons, was released in 2019.
Grohl’s praise of Shiflett came as part of him discussing the band’s chemistry and what everybody in the group brings to the table:
“The most important thing in the Foo Fighters world isn’t that you fit in musically, it’s more that you fit in personally or emotionally. If you’re in the Foo Fighters, it’s not because of the way you play your instrument. It’s because of who you are. We have more emotional prerequisites than we do musical prerequisites.
Taylor fits into it because of his love of Queen and Genesis and Yes and Rush. Pat fits in because of his love of early punk rock music and Mariah Carey, which I don’t know if you talked about, but that is his number-one artist of all time. Nate and I come from the same musical background. We were raised by Devo and the B-52s and Oingo Boingo, and then we discovered hardcore punk rock music and fell in love with the Dead Kennedys and Bad Brains and Black Flag. We jumped in vans as teenagers, slept on floors, played squats. So he and I shared a very similar experience — which is important because A, you have the survival skill set, how to make it through Europe on seven dollars a day, but B, you also use those early experiences as reference or foundation so that once you get a van with air conditioning, you’re like, ‘This has power windows? Holy f*cking sh*t! That’s amazing.’
Chris is, without a doubt, the most accomplished musician in the band. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t joined…. And Rami is such a free-floating peace and love wacky f*cking wanderer. It’s like, sarongs and headwraps. And he became part of it, too. He just fit.”
Check out the full feature here.
