My Hero

This piece, released in January 1998 as the third single from the album The Colour and the Shape (1997), reached number six on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart in the United States. The recording took place in 1997 at Grandmaster Recorders in Hollywood, California, with Gil Norton producing. For the intro and verses, two recorded drum tracks were used and played simultaneously, giving it a particular texture. The full band, with Pat Smear on guitar, Nate Mendel on bass, and William Goldsmith on drums, participated in the creation of this album, the first recorded by the Foo Fighters as a consolidated unit, unlike their debut work. There is a demo of My Hero, recorded by Dave Grohl alone on an 8-track recorder in his Seattle home in July 1995. In this preliminary version, Grohl can be heard singing and playing all the instruments. Although the lyrics were not complete, the vocal melody was already the same as the final version. Bassist Nate Mendel recalled that, upon hearing this demo, he knew the band had a future, as the song was already very good. The music video, directed by Grohl himself, features an anonymous man entering a burning building to rescue a baby, a dog, and a photograph. The clip was filmed in a continuous single take, with smoke concealing the cuts, and shows the band playing amidst the chaos. Despite not having participated in the recording, guitarist Franz Stahl appears in the video.