Dave Grohl talks about Foo Fighters, DC Emo, sound of new album

With their highly anticipated follow up to In Your Honor set to drop later this year, Foo Fighters frontman recently participated in an interview with MTV. Interestingly, he begins by addressing the "emo" movement, particularly as it relates to his early years in Washington DC:

I have a funny relationship with emo. I'm from Washington, D.C., and in the mid-'80s, the hardcore scene changed from what it was -- Bad Brains and Minor Threat and the Dead Kennedys and MDC -- to a bunch of new bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace, [one of] which Ian MacKaye was the singer for. Everyone started labeling it 'emo-core.' So I went to Rites of Spring's first show, and it was a revelation. I'd never heard anything like it, and it was a really emotional experience. But in D.C., we all hated that 'emo-core' tag.

Grohl evens take a mild shot at the scene with one track:

The title has nothing to do with the song -- it's placed right in the middle of the record, where there's a lot of dark stuff. It's a pretty heavy record. We have a couple bummer tunes I felt the album needed something to sit in the center and balance it. So we had this lighthearted song, and I called it 'Cheer Up Boys (Your Make-Up Is Running)' because it seemed like a little ray of hope in the middle of all this despair.

As for the sound of the record:

It's all about musical exploration. We have moments of kick-you-in-the-teeth rock stuff, but there's a lot of power in that lower dynamic too. To be able to get a room to pin-drop silence with an acoustic song that means something is sometimes even more powerful than all the lights and lasers and amps in the world."

The record is titled Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace and is due out September 25, 2007. The band also reissued their 1997 album, The Colour and the Shape earlier this month.