Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters break down Your Favorite Toy track by track

1 May 2026, 14:24

Foo Fighters - Your Favorite Toy | X-Posure Album Playback

Radio X’s John Kennedy sits down with Dave Grohl, Chris Shiflett, Nate Mendel and Pat Smear to talk through the twelfth Foo Fighters album track by track. From the inspiration behind each song to the stories from the studio, this is a deep dive into the band’s latest record...

By Radio X

@RadioX

"We recorded this one in my house" says Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters' twelfth studio album Your Favorite Toy. This wasn't a first for the Foos - 2011's Wasting Light had been put together in the garage at Grohl's home in Encino, California. But there was a much more old school technique applied to tjhhis new material, some of which had been in the frontman's back pocket for a number of years - with a couple of riffs even pre-dating the Nirvana era.

"The amount of songs and ideas were just kind of building up and I was banking everything," Grohl told Radio X's John Kennedy during a very special X-Posure Album Playback in April 2026, which you can watch above.

"There was a really wide range of dynamics. Some of them were really short and had a faster, fresh, kind of almost like punk energy to them. Then there were others that were like much more elaborate and more balladesque and things like that."

He went on: "Listening to all of those demos, there was this clutch of songs that had a ton of energy and seemed to work really well together. So the idea was, okay, let's do this quickly. Let's simplify everything. And pick the ten or twelve songs that seemed to fit together, make an album that had a sound, and just blast through it as quickly as we could."

And that's what Foo Fighters did. The ten songs that make up Your Favorite Toy have links back to Grohl's years with Nirvana, his pre-fame bands Scream and Dain Bramage and even Dave's obscure solo project Pocketwatch, which snuck out on cassette back in 1992.

Along the way, the group namecheck everyone from Mission Of Burma to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, discuss the ways that new drummer Ilan Rubin has re-energised the group, how guitar legend Pat Smear is the Foos' secret weapon and why the Wicked sequel ruined Dave Grohl's plans for the album's title.

1. Caught In The Echo

   Dave Grohl: "This one just kind of felt exciting because it was reminiscent of bands from Washington, D.C. that I loved growing up. It really kind of has that vibe to it. Lyrically, it's always important to me to have that perfect opening line for the first song on a record as we still sequence albums like beginning of side A, end of side A, beginning of side B, end of side B. It's a really good way to do it, because it paces things almost like a setlist, right? That we still think in terms of album, you know. So, the opening line that says, 'This is a test of a broken broadcast system. Consider this an evaluation of all of my hallucinations'... That kind of really sets the tone for the rest of the album. After we recorded it, I was like, okay, this has got to be the first song on the record, definitely."

   

   Foo Fighters - Caught In The Echo (Lyric Video)

2. Of All The People

   Dave Grohl: "This one sounds a lot like Scream, the band I was in before Nirvana. I think a lot of the songs on this record, they just kind of feel natural or comfortable to us, you know? It just sounds like us and what we do. It seems like, twelve albums in, you can decide what you want to do. You've challenged yourself so much in the past, tried to do so many different things and it's like, hang on a minute, maybe we just want we want to just do this, keep it straightforward and do what we know and love."

   

   Foo Fighters - Of All People (Lyric Video)

   "It's funny, the way we function as a band. I mean, I know that all of this is much different than it was when we were young and playing in bands in a garage. But we still function like a band that plays in a f**king garage. We could start using bigger production where we play to click tracks and things like that. We could do pre-production with a music director and things that a lot of bands do now. There's nothing wrong with that. But we just function as a really sort of simple band. We keep it really simple."

3. Window

   Dave Grohl: "This was just kind of a fun little riff. And I thought it would be fun to record it with my daughter Harper, who plays the bass. To me, that's the song that's most reminiscent of the '90s. It feels kind of like a Breeders vibe, while at the same time, there's chords in it that remind me of the song Marigold that I wrote when I was in Nirvana.

   

   Foo Fighters - Window (Official Video)

   "I didn't try to, like, go deep on that. That lyric in the chorus: 'You were a window cleaner, letting in the sun." It's just kind of a funny image because have you ever been in a building, laying in your underwear in a hotel, and all of a sudden you hear something clacking against the window, and there's two dudes cleaning the window, and you think, 'Can they see me right now?'"

4. Your Favorite Toy

   Dave Grohl: "I wanted to call the record For Good, because in that song, Your Favorite Toy it says, 'Someone threw away your favourite toy for good.' I was like, 'Oh, that's a good not only title for the song, but also for the album.' It could have more than a few meanings, but I'm like, 'That's kind of nice, For Good.' Then that Wicked movie came out. And it's called Wicked: For Good. I was so p*ssed. So then I changed the title of the song and then it just became the title of the album."

   

   Foo Fighters - Your Favorite Toy (Lyric Video)

5. If You Only Knew

   Dave Grohl: "Most songs, you know, that it's like 1, 2, 3, 4. You always know where the 1 is, right? There's some songs that will begin on an upbeat or on an end note. This song, everyone had a little bit of a hard time finding the 1. So it's like 1, 2, 3, da. When we did a demo of it, I remember everyone listening to the demo going like, 'Wait, hold on a second. Where's the one? So it was kind of a bit of a challenge to sort of piece it all together."

   

   Foo Fighters - If You Only Knew (Lyric Video)

6. Spit Shine

   Dave Grohl: "This is a riff and an idea that's been around for a while - I don't know, maybe eight years or something like that. It's a riff that just didn't seem to fit on any of the previous records. And the drum beat is inspired by this thing that I recorded on a Killing Joke record a long time ago. It was called Asteroid. It's an insane song, it's so amazing. And the beat had a super heavy riff over it. I don't know what kind of beat that would be. It's not like a bossa nova beat. I don't know what it is, but with like giant riffs over it. If you listen to what Ilan's doing on the hi-hat, it kind of gives this little shimmy to it, with a screamin' ass distorted vocal over it."

   

   Foo Fighters - Spit Shine (Official Video)

7. Unconditional

   Dave Grohl: "There's something about the melody, it's just like a melancholic twist of verse, chorus, verse. But that seems reminiscent of even pre-Foo Fighters, like when I was recording stuff with [producer] Barrett Jones, I did this cassette tape for this little label in DC, called Simple Machines, called Pocketwatch. I think they made 100 of them or something like that. We've had songs with those chords for like, decades."

   

   Foo Fighters - Unconditional (Lyric Video)

8. Child Actor

   Dave Grohl: "Was I a child actor? I was in a play called Compulsion. My mother was a high school teacher and she was involved in the drama department. This is when I was, like, eight, nine years old, and they would try to get me to audition for the things at school. I wasn't really into it. I was kind of embarrassed. But then this Compulsion thing, it was like, if you play the part of this kid and walk on stage and say, like, five or six things, 'You'll get $100.' And I'm like, 'Oh my God.' So I did it.

   "Then I got asked to do this other thing where Jimmy Carter - this was like late '70s and he was the President. Someone in his Cabinet was retiring, so they had a roast for him. And so, I was hired to be Amy Carter, Jimmy Carter's daughter, for which I got another $100. But this time they wanted me in drag, right, as Amy. I don't know, they didn't know anybody better. Those are my acting gigs when I was young."

   

   Foo Fighters - Child Actor (Lyric Video)

9. Amen, Caveman

   Dave Grohl: "That riff had been around for a really long time. It's like, pre-Scream, I was in a band called Dane Bramage, and it was me and two friends. It was the first LP I ever made. I think I was 16 or 17. The album is called I Scream Not Coming Down. We were a three-piece. To be honest, it was very much like being in Nirvana before Nirvana. We would start every rehearsal with just a jam. The guitarist and vocalist was a guy named Reuben Ratting. Brilliant musician - still an incredible musician.

   "This song in particular, it feels comfortable to me because, I mean, you know, a lot of this record, it's like comfort food, you know? I don't want to come home and do some sort of Michelin star dinner. I kind of want meat and potatoes. And so that this song is like that."

   

   Foo Fighters - Amen, Caveman (Lyric Video)

10. Asking For A Friend

    Pat Smear: "I have to ask Dave a question, which is... This is the first song we did on this record. From the moment we said, okay, Ilan, you're the guy, how long did it take you to get him to your house to record this song?"

    Dave Grohl: "Days. Within a few days. I almost give him credit for the song, for being the inspiration, or at least for the recording of the song. There was a little bit of a demo before that, or just like a really basic idea. Ilan was meant to go out on one more Nine Inch Nails tour before he was going to come and start jamming with us. But they let him go early, so he called and said, 'Well, I'm available now'. He came over to the house and I think we had the drum track by two o'clock in the afternoon or something like that.

    

    Foo Fighters - Asking For A Friend (Audio)

    "Just the energy of that with Ilan, you know, the guy's a monster. I don't think he was even born when Nirvana was a band. I'm not sure. Or maybe he was a kid. And so it's like he has the energy of a 37-year-old, which to us is really young. And so he'll just barrel through like 10 incredibly hardcore fast songs in a row. He hardly breaks a sweat. I remember the first show we played was maybe 2 hours and 45 minutes or something, and we hadn't done a show in a long time. And we walk off stage like, oh, f**k, damn, that was awesome. And Ilan's jumping around like, I could do another hour. We were like, slow down, kid. He definitely lit a fire."