Songoftheday 2/2/22 - Run and tell all of the angels this could take all night, think I need a devil to help me get things right...
"Learn To Fly" - Foo Fighters
from the album There Is Nothing Left To Lose (1999)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #19 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 12
Today's song comes from the band Foo Fighters, who were put together by Dave Grohl after the death of Kurt Cobain caused the end of Nirvana in the mid-1990s. Their eponymous first album in 1995, which actually was recorded as a solo set by Grohl, scored a pair of top-40 airplay hits with "This Is A Call" and "Big Me". The band's sophomore effort, The Colour And The Shape, actually was a group effort, and the second offering to radio from the set, "Everlong", nearly made the airplay top-40 in the autumn of 1997. None of these songs, however, were able to place on Billboard magazine's "official" pop Hot 100 chart since they weren't released as commercially-available retail singles. In the interim, band members guitarist Pat Smear and drummer William Goldsmith left the group.
By the time for their third release There Is Nothing Left To Lose, those rules were changed, and it benefited rock acts like them greatly. The first single from the record was the high-powered drama of "Learn To Fly". Written by Grohl and bandmate Nate Mendel along with new drummer Taylor Hawkins, they produced the track with Seattle-based producer Adam Kasper. The song has Grohl seeming to be trying to find inspiration to forge a new path as well as ground himself from the whirlwind that was the storm around his former band, though he completely recently debunked this. The music video, though, was a different animal, with the sincerity of the song put aside by the completely hysterical comic antics of the bandmates being the flight crew on a plane, taking the literal sense of the title into the stratosphere. It helps that they have Jack Black and Kyle Gass, aka "Tenacious D", co-starring with them, with Grohl, Hawkins, and Mendel getting in multiple outfits including drag...
"Learn To Fly" became the Foo Fighters' first "official" top-40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in January of 2000. The song was also their first to reach #1 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart, and it spent four weeks at #2 on their Mainstream Rock radio list. It was their biggest success on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format chart, spending a half of a year (26 weeks) on the list, while getting to #4 on the Adult Album Alternative (or "Triple-A") radio chart. Internationally, the single reached the top-40 in Canada (#13), the UK (#21), New Zealand (#23), and Australia (#36). The There Is Nothing Left To Lose album, released in November of 1999, peaked at #10 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2001, the "Learn To Fly" music video won for Best Short Form Music Video, while the song was nominated for Best Duo/Group Rock performance, losing out to U2 for their "Beautiful Day". There Is Nothing Left To Lose also won for Best Rock Album.
The Fighters' second single from the album, the aggressive guitar fuzz bossa nova of "Stacked Actors", climbed to #9 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart, and #25 on the Alternative Rock list, but probably was a little too noisy for pop stations to sign on to. That was followed by "Breakout". which was also featured in the Jim Carrey movie Me, Myself and Irene. It was a bit more melodic, and it went to #8 on the Alternative Rock chart, #11 on the Mainstream Rock list, and was a top-40 hit in Britain at #29. The fourth offering in America, the mellower "Next Year", rose to #17 on the Alternative Rock chart, got on to the Adult Top-40 list at #40 and hit the "Triple-A" rock chart at #14. It helped that "Next Year" was used as the theme song to the popular TV sitcom Ed. Also, the album track "Generator" was released as a single in Australia, where it became a top-40 hit at #31. Foo Fighters will return to the series.
(10/10)
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Next up, live in concert in Australia in 2000...
Fast forward to the Foos at Wembley Arena in London in 2008...
In 2011, the band, reunited with Pat Smear, played the Late Show with David Letterman...
In 2015, a group of 1000 musicians in a small town in Italy taped a cover of the song to get the Foo Fighters to play there, which they eventually did. This fills me with such joy...
and lastly, Dave Grohl doing an acoustic version in 2016...
Up tomorrow: This young country singer shrugs it off.
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