Robbed hit of the week 10/30/23 - Foo Fighters' "All My Life"...

 

 

"All My Life" - Foo Fighters

from the album One By One (2002)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #43 (two weeks)

 

This week's "robbed hit" comes from the Foo Fighters, whose third album There Is Nothing Left To Lose had landed the band their first official top-40 hit on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart in the beginning of 2000 with "Learn To Fly".  The following year, the group contributed a song to the soundtrack to the Jack Black/Colin Hanks slacker movie Orange County, "The One", which placed on both the Alternative (#14) and Mainstream (#20) Rock radio charts, while "bubbling under" the Hot 100 at #121. 

At the end of 2002, Dave Grohl and the Fighters returned with One By One, the first to include new guitarist Chris Sheflett. The set was long in the making, delayed by drummer Taylor Hawkins' heroin overdose which sidelined them for a little, and troubles making the actual album. The original sessions, which included "The One", would eventually be mostly scrapped and redone in the hurried time between Grohl's side-gig drumming for Queens Of The Stone Age. The result was a harder sound than their pop-friendly last set. The lead single was "All My Life", written by Grohl, Hawkins, and Shiflett with the group's bassist Nate Mendel. The lyrics seem to be the usual uplifting yet angry mantras, though Grohl has said it was actually about oral pleasures. I'm unsure if he was kidding or not, though it would make twisted sense with lines in the chorus like "Hey, don't let it go to waste, I love it but I hate the taste". OOF. ANYhoo, the production from the band with Nick Raskulinecz is definitely more punk-ish than pop, with the menacing sound attacking at all sides, in a GOOD way. But the chorus rings through so melodically in the way Grohl is the master of, so the loud-more loud pattern pays off. The band even took a break from their pattern of comic music videos, opting for a concert recreation that has a twist at the end...

While "All My Life" was a massive rock radio hit, spending ten weeks at #1 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart, and taking a week at #3 on the Mainstream Rock counterpart, the song stalled just under the top-40 on the Billboard Hot 100 (most likely from lack of pop radio notice and lack of commercial single sales points) in December of 2002. Internationally, the single peaked at #5 in the United Kingdom (where there was a single commercial release), and hit the top-40 in Norway (#13), Ireland (#14), Australia (#20), Italy (#30), and Sweden (#37). The One By One album, released in October of that year, took a week at #3 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2003, "All My Life" won the trophy for Best Hard Rock Performance, and was nominated for Best Rock Song, losing to Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising". The following year, One By One won the Grammy for Best Rock Album. 

The second single from One By One was "Times Like These", one of the "new" songs that came about in the final recordings, and my personal favorite from the record. The single reached #5 on both the Mainstream and Alternative Rock radio charts, and parked at #65 on the Hot 100. The song was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Duo/Group Performance in 2004, which went to Warren Zevon and Bruce Springsteen for "Disorder In The House". That was followed by the esoteric rocker "Low", which rose to #15 on the Alternative Rock chart and #23 on the Mainstream list. The final single from the record, "Have It All", didn't get much play in the States, though it reached the top-40 in the UK at #37. However the "B-Side" of the single, a remake of Prince's salacious Purple Rain album track "Darling Nikki", managed to get enough rock radio love to reach #15 on the Alternative chart, lingering for a half a year (26 weeks). 

(7/10)

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Here's the Fighters appearing on the British late-night music show Later With Jools Holland in 2002... 

 

 Next up, in concert at Wembley Stadium in London in 2008...

After the tragic death of Taylor Hawkins, the Fighters came back strong at Glastonbury in 2023...

Lastly, here's the Foo Fighters getting their Beatles on on Letterman...