It’s a good week to be a Foo Fighters fan. In addition to the Friday night premiere of the Grohl-directed Sonic Highways HBO series chronicling the making of the Foos new album, the band has announced a weeklong residency on the Late Show with David Letterman. The band will perform a different cover each night, with certain musical guests, inspired by the cities documented in Sonic Highways. It’s a fitting booking, as the band has a long history with Letterman – on the first show back from his heart surgery way back in The Year 2000, Dave introduced the Foos as “my favorite band, playing my favorite song” before the band ripped into “Everlong.” When Wasting Light came out, the band played a two hour set on the Late Show in tribute to the Beatles (Letterman, in case you don’t watch late night television, is taped in the Ed Sullivan theater, a/k/a where Four Lads from Liverpool Changed Music Forever in America). Really, no one knows how many times the Foo Fighters have played “Everlong” on David Letterman, even me.
If you’re Max, or if you’re like Max, then you’re chomping at the bits for these performances, as Letterman is slated to retire sometime in the next month or so (no one quite knows when his last show will be – but the rumors around the water cooler is that Bill Murray may be his final guest). So you can bet that these will be special shows.
Meanwhile, the band has released a new conversation/behind the scenes look at Sonic Highways in anticipation of its premiere, which further emphasizes how big of an undertaking this recording experiment is – not just in terms of cash and the whole, like, filming a documentary series aspect, but also artistically. It seems as though the band really pulled a lot from each city that they visited, as opposed to just recording some song they wrote at a bunch of nice studios. Although they also did that, and I’m really looking forward to getting a little look into how Steve Albini works.While the stories and interviews look great, I’m still praying for a really behind-the-scenes 8 hour fly-on-the-wall video of them mixing this thing… it must’ve been a crazy post-production process.
