Even when not working with Dave Grohl in the Foo Fighters, Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins is inspired by his long time band mate. Hawkins deiced to do his first solo project, K.O.T.A, after watching Grohl record on his own.
“I always do demos by myself. The first time I saw anyone do it in person I watched Dave jump around from instrument to instrument,” Hawkins says. “I watched him do the demos really quick and I started doing that and it’s really fun if you have a really clear idea.”
In a band as big as Foo Fighters, who have sold more than 30 million albums worldwide and won four Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album, there isn’t a lot of downtime. So, for Hawkins, who wanted to make new music during the band’s 2016 break, he knew he had to act quickly.
“With time being of the essence, I just don’t have a lot of time, so I just thought, ‘I’ll make a little quick EP,'" he says. "People don’t really give a f**k about albums that much anymore.’ You can do a little EP, you can get it done quick, you can put it out yourself, it’s so easy now and I have a little studio in my house, which I just put in this year. I just enjoy futzing around on my own and basically doing demos on steroids. I like the way it came out. I think it’s got a neat sound to it.”
When it came to recording, Hawkins went for a quick minimalist approach. Take for example the track “Range Rover B***h.” “I recorded pretty much all of that song in three hours and wrote the lyrics right there too,” he recalls. “I had a basic idea, put down a drum track, put down a scratch guitar track and a scratch bass track, then went in the other room for 20 minutes, I knew it was gonna be called ‘Range Rover B***h,’ I wrote the lyrics really quick. It’s a short song, I jumped back in there, made my bass really distorted, used one pass of bass, get a couple of passes of guitars and turned out a bunch of echoes. I said, ‘I’ll make it sound like Dave Navarro.’ Then I went in and tracked a bunch of vocals pretty quickly and that was pretty much it.”
For Hawkins, whose previous work outside of the Foo Fighters was released under the band names the Coattail Riders and Birds Of Satan among others, the decision to release K.O.T.A. as a solo album came, thanks in part, from a vote of confidence from a friend. “I’m always trying to figure out a new way to make it interesting for myself. My buddy ‘Juano’ (Jon Davison), who sings in Yes now, he’s like, ‘Your demos are really cool on their own, why don’t you make a record like that, a really raw, quick record?’ So I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right.’”
Hawkins doesn’t plan on touring behind K.O.T.A. He is already back in Foos mode, with the band having just been announced as one of the headliners for the BottleRock festival in Napa Valley, California with a European tour to follow. But he does have an album he is very happy with.
“I’m proud I played everything, I never really thought you could do it until I watched Dave do it to be honest,” he says.
