The Foo Fighters sat down to tell the story of both their album “Sonic Highways,” and their accompanying HBO series of the same name in an epic five-minute extended trailer. For both, the band hit up eight different cities to record eight different songs.
Their intention was to visit studios that had not been covered as extensively. “We mostly wanted to pick cities that meant something to us,” Pat Smears said. Songs were recorded in Seattle, Chicago, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Nashville, Austin, New Orleans and New York.
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The tagline for the trailer is “8 cities, 8 episodes, 8 songs.” Grohl revealed the unusual and challenging songwriting process for this project, wherein the band interviewed artists from each city and then tried to write a song around quotes from those interviews.
“There’s no way that you can tell the history of a city’s music in one hour,” Grohl explained of the HBO series. “So we have to do it in a way that relates to the band and goes from Point A to Point B and becomes a song. So the finale of the episode, when you see us performing the song that we’ve been writing, you’ll recognize all of these references from stories that you’ve heard in the last hour.”
The show promises to be a star-studded affair, with Grohl stating that visits to certain cities require conversations with its biggest musical names like Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Chuck D, LL Cool J, Mike D, Bonnie Raitt, Slash, Gary Clark Jr. and Joan Jett.
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In promotion of the show, the Foo Fighters will settle in for a week-long residency on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” starting Monday, Oct. 13. The band will not play any of the songs from the new album, but will instead spotlight covers from the cities they visited during its recording. They are expected to be joined by some of those same legendary performers they visited during their traveling recording sessions.
“Foo Fighters Sonic Highways” premieres on Friday, Oct. 17 at 11 p.m. ET on HBO, one day after the first single. The full album is scheduled to drop Monday, Nov. 10.
