Times Like These

The Foo Fighters almost broke up making One By One. “Times Like These” is the sound of them deciding not to.

The first recording session was a disaster. They scrapped the whole album. Band members were at each other’s throats, and Dave Grohl was asking himself whether any of it was worth continuing. So they went back to his basement, stripped the songs down to what was actually there, and recorded them again. What came out the second time was rawer and more desperate, and in the case of this song, almost unbearably hopeful.

I am a new day rising.

Grohl wrote that line while everything around it was falling apart. It isn’t a statement of fact. It’s a declaration of intent — a promise to himself that the dark stretch was temporary. The song starts on acoustic guitar and builds to the full band, the arrangement walking the same road the words do, from despair to something that might be hope.

The Foo Fighters have never been cynical, and they’ve never pretended to be. They were writing earnest songs in a decade when irony was the house style, and Grohl kept meaning exactly what he said. “Times Like These” is earnest right up to the edge of vulnerability. It is also true.

It’s times like these you learn to live again.

I’ve reached for this song more times than I can count. The bad diagnosis. The divorce papers. The 3 A.M. moment when everything feels impossible.

He isn’t handing you a solution. He’s handing you company — the plain acknowledgment that falling apart is part of how this works, that the new day rises whether you’re ready for it or not.

Some songs help you get through things.

This one helped the band that wrote it.