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And Finally Artist News
Ghosts guest on new Foo Fighters album
By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 23 March 2020
The Foo Fighters will release their tenth album later this year, marking their 25th anniversary as a band. It is, Dave Grohl has said, “unlike anything we’ve ever done” and something he’s so nervous about playing to other people, it makes him feel like “a six year old kid with his pants down at school”. Also, the recording of it was hampered by a ghost.
As soon as the band entered the 1940s house in Encino, California where they recorded the album, Grohl tells Mojo, he “knew the vibes were definitely off”. His gut feeling was confirmed when “things started happening”. So that’s a clear cut case.
“We would come back to the studio the next day and all of the guitars would be detuned”, he says. “Or the setting we’d put on the board, all of them had gone back to zero. We would open up a Pro Tools session and tracks would be missing. There were some tracks that were put on there that we didn’t put on there. But just like weird open mic noises. Nobody playing an instrument or anything like that, just an open mic recording a room”.
So, there you go. You might say that it’s quite common for guitars to go out of tune in a cold old house, and that there are any number of explanations for the rest of this, but you’re forgetting the “vibes”. Plus ghosts, possibly dead for decades, could easily work out how to use modern recording equipment and computers. That’s a thing they do.
Anyway, I detect a note of cynicism in your voice in that last paragraph. And you should not be cynical, because there’s more to this.
“It got to the point where I brought one of those nest cams that I still have at home, for when my kids would sleep in their cribs”, he says. “I set it up overnight so we could see if there was anyone there or anyone was coming to fuck with us. At first, nothing. And right around the time we thought we were ridiculous and we were out of our minds, we started to see things on the nest cam that we couldn’t explain”.
Holy shit, man! What? What?! “When we found out about the history of the house, I had to sign a fucking non-disclosure agreement with the landlord because he’s trying to sell the place. So, I can’t give away what happened there in the past but these multiple occurrences over a short period of time made us finish the album as quickly as we could”.
Right. Well, anyway, the Foo Fighters’ rushed new album does not yet have a release date, but it was played to journalists at listening parties earlier this month, back when you could still do such things. The response seems to have been overwhelmingly positive, so maybe everyone should start recording in a panic in haunted houses. Although make sure there’s at least two metres between you and the ghosts at all times.
