Songfacts®:

• This is a track from Sonic Highways, an album containing eight songs, each recorded in a different US city. A TV documentary series, also titled Sonic Highways, was created for HBO by Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl to coincide with the release of the record.
• The hard-hitting anthem was recorded in Seattle and was inspired by the end of Dave Grohl's previous band, Nirvana. The first music that he recorded under the Foo Fighters banner after the death of of Kurt Cobain was done in the same studio where Nirvana had recorded its last complete song, "You Know You're Right." Grohl recalled to the Studio Brussel radio station: "I didn't want to make music any more after Nirvana, then time went on and I thought wait a minute, music is the one thing that's going to help me start over, it's going to heal me, so that's what I have to keep doing.
  
  "So I went back to that same studio, and recorded again, and my life started over again, so that becomes the theme of the episode, and that also becomes the theme of the song."
• The mood according to Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins was sombre. " I had a dark feeling about Seattle," he told Q magazine. "The song is dark and sad, it's about the end of something."