Foo Fighters say this 'Medicine At Midnight' song started out "like a joke"

For their 10th studio album, Medicine at Midnight, the Foo Fighters looked to do something different—as Dave Grohl put it, they wanted to release a "Saturday night party album"—so things got weird in the studio.

During a recent interview with Guitar World, the band divulged that the album's closing track, "Love Dies Young," actually started out "like a joke." Grohl explained how the track started out as a “strummy sort of song we’ve done a million times,” so was unlikely to make the cut. But then drummer Taylor Hawkins asked a question that steered the rockers into uncharted territory.

“Taylor was like, ‘What drum beat should we do? How about a 16th-note thing?’” Grohl recalled. “And I went, ‘F**k that! What about an Abba side-high-hat-disco thing? We’ve never messed with that before!’ And then the guitar riff turned into a [Queen’s] ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ type of thing.”

“The galloping rhythm part that I did in that song, it’s like ‘Eye of the Tiger,'” guitarist Chris Shiflett added. “It was almost like a joke. But we listened back to it and we were like, ‘Hmm … that actually sounds pretty good!’”

“Each instrument we put on, we were just sitting on the couch laughing, because we’re doing the things we’re not supposed to do," Grohl admitted. "We’re not supposed to do the galloping flange guitar! We’re not supposed to do the Abba beat! But we’re just like, ‘F**k, load it up, man!’ And then at the end of the day, we had something we’d never done before.”

Listen to "Love Dies Young" above.

This article was first published on iheart.com and is republished here with permission