Which Foo Fighters song is about Kurt Cobain?

5 April 2024, 9:00

Three decades after the death of Kurt Cobain, we delve into the only track Dave Grohl admits to writing about his friend and Nirvana bandmate.

April 2024 marks three whole decades since Kurt Cobain tragically took his own life - but the Nirvana frontman's music and lyrics have continued to touch new generations of fans the world over.

While his colleague Dave Grohl has opened up about the death of his former bandmate in recent years, the drummer hasn't always been so comfortable discussing the tragedy.

While it wouldn't be unreasonable to think the Foos frontman may have tackled this loss in his music, there's only one song he directly attributes to being about Kurt Cobain... and it might not be what you think.

Some fans assume that My Hero from Foo Fighters' 1997 The Colour and the Shape album is about the late grunge icon, but it's credited about being about the "common man".

Releasing a statement in 2008 when Republican candidate John McCain used the track without their permission, the band wrote: “The saddest thing about this is that My Hero was written as a celebration of the common man and his extraordinary potential. To have it appropriated without our knowledge and used in a manner that perverts the original sentiment of the lyric just tarnishes the song.”

However it's actually on Disc 2 of Foo Fighters' 2005 album In Your Honor that the closest thing to 'a Kurt Cobain tribute' can be found.

Friend of a Friend was an acoustic track penned by Grohl in 1990 - a fewweeks after he'd moved to Seattle to join Nirvana.

Written in Kurt's Olympia apartment on his acoustic guitar, the track describes Grohl's first impressions of the frontman and bassist Krist Novelselic... and paints a pretty bleak picture of the band's early days.

The song captures the act of Grohl finding Cobain's guitar, with the lyrics: "He plays an old guitar/With a coin found by the phone/It was his friend's guitar/That he played".

It also hints at Kurt's early drinking habit, with the lines: "He thinks he drinks too much/'Cause when he tells his two best friends/'I think I drink too much'/No-one speaks".

The song was first recorded in secret in 1990, before being released on Grohl's pseudonymous Pocketwatch cassette, released under the name Late! two years later.

Despite being recorded again for a BBC Evening session in 1997, it wasn't until its appearance on the bonus disc of In Your Honor in June 2005 that Grohl revealed the origins of Friend Of A Friend.

When quizzed about the track, Grohl told Q Magazine: "I'd just moved in with Kurt. I didn't know anybody. I had a drum set packed in one box and flew up there. I would stay up till the sun came up and sleep all day.

"Olympia, Washington, is fucking depressing enough and I was living with this person that I didn't know. But he had a four-track so I wrote songs: Marigold and Friend Of A Friend. It was an observation of Kurt and Krist and I."

Asked if he ever played the song to Kurt, he simply responded: "No. I don't think I did. Probably not."

Written years before Kurt's untimely death, and more of an "observation," than a tribute, Friend of a Friend just happens to capture a moment in time, representing the early and uncertain days of Grohl joining the band.

READ MORE: How This Is A Call saved Dave Grohl after the death of Kurt Cobain