What was the process of making Medicine At Midnight like?
“We recorded it in this fucked-up old house in my neighbourhood instead of using a studio, and every day we’d come in with a basic idea, like, ‘Okay, here’s the rhythm of the song,’ or, ‘Here’s the basic riff,’ and we would build on that. We didn’t necessarily all sit in a room, work out the song and then hit ‘record’; it was more like we were building it from the bottom up. And, seven months later, to then finally get into a room and finally play these songs as a band felt so fucking good – and really easy, to be honest. It’s one of the easiest albums for us to perform. There have been other records where we’ve recorded things that have been a bit more technically involved, and this one was just big guitars, big fuckin’ grooves and big fuckin’ choruses. As we were writing the songs I was really imagining, ‘Oh god, this is gonna be so good at the festival,’ or, ‘This is gonna be so good at the stadium.’ I really took the live show into consideration, and made these anthemic choruses that I imagined 100,000 people singing along to. Unfortunately that’s not gonna happen right now (laughs).”
What made Shame Shame stand out as the first song to show people compared to other new material?
“When we first started recording the record, we were recording songs that were recognisable as the Foo Fighters. Actually, the first song that we recorded is the first song on the record: Making A Fire. And that really kind of set the tone, like, ‘Okay, this is really up and really fuckin’ big, and let’s keep moving in that direction.’ And after a few weeks I came in with this idea, which is originally based on a simple guitar riff and this unusual rhythm which is a drum set recorded in a stairwell, but then there’s this finger-snapping and stomping and clapping loop that’s behind it. Those two things started coming together, and rather than load a lot of things on top of it, we kept it really simple: there’s an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, a bass, a vocal, and also this keyboard part. It was noticeably different than anything we’ve ever done, and I always think that when you’re releasing a song before an album, you want it to give a little bit of pretext for things to come; you want to present this to your audience as some sort of indication that we’re not just making the same Foo Fighters record again. And there was something about it, with the vibe and the rhythm, that just seems like new territory for us.”