By now, we've all heard the story, as recapped by Eric Harvey at Wondering Sound:
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: being in a band is like being married. Egos have to be managed, credit shared, mutual creativity encouraged. This simple fact has driven some of the best and most famous music documentaries: The Beatles‘ frigid making-of Let it Be, Wilco‘s tumultuous I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, and Metallica‘s psychoanalytic Some Kind of Monster derive their narrative force and dramatic tension from bands unable to perform the basic function of being in a band: writing and recording songs together. From this perspective, then, the Foo Fighters‘ 20th-anniversary HBO series Sonic Highways is a small miracle. The series focuses on Dave Grohl and his band traveling to various music-centric cities around the country, writing songs based on them, and recording those songs in legendary local studios.
Of course, the accumulated tracks form the new album, Sonic Highways. None of the songs have thus far become ear worms, but they're solid, and the Foo Fighters sound remains vital in a time when rock and roll is receding on all fronts. It's very hard not to like Grohl in the curmudgeonly persona of classic rock-via-punk defender (and he also played in that other band, too), and I don't begrudge his efforts to establish linkage to the musical greats in the cities he's visited to make the series and album.
We make our own legacies and construct our own shticks. I have some experience with that, myself.
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