Run

Album: Concrete and Gold (2017)
Charted: 64
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the first new Foo Fighters song since the band gifted fans with the free Saint Cecilia EP in late 2015. The band penned the tune in early 2017 with some upcoming European festival in mind. Speaking with The Kevin & Bean Show on June 1, 2017, Grohl said:

    "It's something that we came up with not too long ago, maybe three or four months ago. We're about to go out and do a bunch of shows this summer so we kind of felt weird going out on tour without anything new to play, so we thought we'd offer this up before we go out."
  • The Foos first tested the new song in a live setting when they played a surprise gig at an arts center in the south west of England. back on February 24, 2017.
  • The video, directed by Dave Grohl, sees the band dressed as elderly men, rocking out to a crowd of old people in a nursing home. Their gig provokes a riot among the senior citizens then right at the end, it descends into a Thriller-esque dance scene. Grohl explained on Zane Lowe's Beats 1 show:

    "This video began with Taylor saying, 'We're getting old. What are we gonna do about promo photos? We're so ugly now?' and I was like, 'Let it go it doesn't really matter' and Taylor said in our next video we should be 100 years-old thrashing to this song and I laughed about it and was like what if we ended up in this senior citizen home.

    I wrote up this treatment and everyone thought it was funny so we sent it to our producers who did Sound City and Sonic Highways and came back with the reality of prosthetics and the budget and how we're gonna pull it off and it became a crazy melee of pulling off the craziest fiasco ever."
  • Grohl revealed that the guy behind their make-up appeared in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video.

    "We had to get our faces cast - it's claustrophobic. Once you've done that, you send the make-up to the guy - he's Tony he was in the 'Thriller' video he's the dude whose arm falls off," The Foos frontman explained. "He starts making the makeup and we tried to tell him what we thought we should look like and Pat [Smear] sent him a picture of Frederick Douglass [African-American social reformer in the 1800s] and it looks exactly like him.

    Grohl added: "I thought it would be funny if Taylor [Hawkins] had a skullet. Rami [Jaffee, keyboards] looks the - I hope he looks like that when he gets older. [Chris] Shifty [Shiflett] looks a little angry. Nate [Mendel] looks pretty pathetic, he doesn't look old he just looks ill, like he's not got much time."
  • This won for Best Rock Song at the Grammy Awards in 2018. No rock awards were televised that year.

Comments: 1

  • Lee from Raleigh, NcThis song blew my face off and it makes me feel inspired, like back when I first heard Nirvana. Best energy and creativity in a rock song in the last three decades. The video is attention grabbing in that you can instantly identify with the frustration the nursing home patients are feeling. You feel like one of them. You are rooting hard for them. They blow it up, naturally. Thanks, FF!
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