90's Jams #13: Foo Fighters "Everlong" (1997)

The 90's had a certain type of "adolescent dramady TV" genre that doesn't exist nearly as often these days. The great trilogy of these was The Wonder Years, My So-Called Life and Freaks And Geeks, all three of which featured nerdy male characters with immensely huge high school crushes, often presented in moments where they experienced what seemed to be hundreds of conflicting emotions all at once, extreme drama, head-voices speaking at the same time and all so quickly, emotional chemicals rushing... Musically, proto-emo was the stuff that matched this the closest in the 90's. If Pinkerton was the great musical document of this type of alt-rock, then "Everlong" was surely its "Teen Spirit" (although not as huge sounding, but surely seminal in making radio airwaves safe for the Jimmy Eat World's and Saves The Day's that were to follow). Ex-Alanis drummer Taylor Hawkins was not yet a Foo Fighter until the sessions for The Colour And The Shape were coming to a close. As a result, and contrary to popular belief, it is in fact Grohl who lays down the killer drumming on "Everlong," with all its complex subtleties intact, adding yet another layer to the already immense tension that comes with its chord structure and the subtly subdued Grohl-vox.

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