You Oughta Know
Band is performing on the show every night this week
Foo Fighters ripped through the Your Favorite Toy rocker “Window” on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday. The quintet settles into an easy, almost southern rock-inspired groove for a few verses before breaking down to silence in the middle, as frontman Dave Grohl sings, “I saw your face, there in the window/You were a window cleaner,” before closing the short number with an understated guitar solo. The performance was the first of four that the band will play on Kimmel’s show this week.
Since Foo Fighters are playing a residency of sorts, playing a different song every night, Grohl sat down for an extended interview with Kimmel, in which he talked about “Window.” “This song in particular, I remember my daughter Harper, who’s 17, she was just learning the bass, so I thought, ‘I’m gonna write a song … that she can come upstairs and put a bass line on, like really simple, and then we can jam together,'” he said.
“Her favorite band is the Breeders. So I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll do this thing that’s kind of like the Breeders.’ … The inspiration behind the song is, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a hotel room where you’re lying there in your skivvies, and the curtains are open, and all of a sudden, here comes the window cleaner guy.” He said he realized that window cleaners witness people’s most intimate moments and wrote a song abut it.
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Grohl also reflected on meeting Taylor Hawkins for the first time at a 1995 event for the L.A. radio station KROQ, where Kimmel worked at the time, called Almost Acoustic Christmas. Hawkins, the late drummer who played for decades with the Foo Fighters, was sitting on the drum throne at the time for Alanis Morissette. “Our first record came out around the time Alanis’ first record came out,” Grohl said. “So we were doing a bunch of those festivals and radio shows and things, but that was the first time I met Taylor, backstage. Here comes this blond, surfer dude, like, ‘Yo, dude, I love your band. You guys are so awesome. Yadda-yadda-yadda.’ I knew, right then, I was like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be best friends for the rest of our lives.'”
They saw each other again at other gigs the Foos played alongside Morissette, and Grohl said he felt the “You Oughta Know” singer could sense a close friendship building between the two. Hawkins later told Grohl that it was after Morissette’s band got on a flight after a gig both groups played in France, that Morissette asked him, “What are you going to do when Dave asks you to be the drummer?” Grohl recalled he told her, “No, baby, I love you.” But Hawkins was the Foo Fighters’ drummer within half a year.