Dave Grohl Says Success Led to Foo Fighters' Hiatus

The Foo Fighters are on a very well-documented break, with all of the members doing other projects. Nate Mendel is on the road with Sunny Day Real Estate and Dave Grohl joined some guys named Josh Homme and John Paul Jones for a band you might've read about called Them Crooked Vultures. But the hiatus has nothing to do with the guys hating each other -- Grohl tells Spinner that after the band ended their last tour they went right into the studio and recorded 13 tracks, two of which, 'Wheels' and 'Word Forward,' ended up on the new 'Greatest Hits' collection.

So why the break then? "I think, to me, the most important thing was to give the audience a break from the band, not even that we need to stop playing," he says. "I feel like the world doesn't need another Foo Fighters record right now."

If anything, the band's overwhelming success is mostly responsible as they first became aware of wanting the respite following the two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium, as seen on their live DVD. "After Wembley we had like three days off and we had to go play a festival in Norway. I remember getting there and it looked like a barbecue," Grohl recalls. "I'm like, 'God, this is tiny. How many people are here?' They're like, '25,000.' I'm like 'This is tiny,' which makes you think, 'Okay, I gotta go home for a while and f---ing get out of the crowds.'"

Grohl says of the live DVD, "I get super-emotional when I watch it, honestly," admitting it still blows his mind. "I've always been surprised, like, 'Really, a Wembley show? Okay,' And it sells out in a day or something and you put another one on sale and that one f---ing sells out. Then you're standing there in the middle of all of that and it's hard not to feel nostalgic or think about all the people in the audience that have been there since '95, '96, whatever, and just imagining it going from a f---ing demo tape to that. I think some of it's been luck. I think a lot of it's been the band touring our asses off and becoming a really good f---ing live band so people want to come out and see it."

Still, there's one place where things haven't changed. "You have to consider a place like this, our studio, where when we come in here to do stuff it doesn't seem like much has changed," he says. "We might have nicer equipment, we might have a bigger set list, but honestly, it seems like everything around the band has changed in the last 15 years. Outside of a few things, the way we work is still exactly the same because we never went into making an album feeling like we were the greatest, biggest rock band in the history of music. We've always felt like the underdogs. Going into make a record, I think it's important to feel like you're making your first record or you're the underdog because I never felt like we can just rely on the name of the band. There's no way. We have to actually try."