The Foo Fighters reportedly faced something entirely new while making their upcoming 10th album: ghosts. Dave Grohl recently told Mojo that the house in Encino, California — a Forties construction — where they recorded had a sinister past.
“When we walked into the house in Encino, I knew the vibes were definitely off but the sound was fucking on,” Grohl said, according to NME. “We started working there and it wasn’t long before things started happening. We would come back to the studio the next day and all of the guitars would be detuned.
“Or the setting we’d put on the board, all of them had gone back to zero,” he continued. “We would open up a Pro Tools session and tracks would be missing. There were some tracks that were put on there that we didn’t put on there. But just like weird open mic noises. Nobody playing an instrument or anything like that, just an open mic recording a room. And we’d fucking zero in on sounds within that. And we didn’t hear any voices or anything really decipherable. But something was happening.”
The group attempted to document the paranormal phenomena with a “nest cam” to take video of the studio when they weren’t there. “We started to see things on the nest cam that we couldn’t explain,” Grohl said. So he took it to the homeowner who detailed the house’s illustrious past — but Grohl won’t say what he found out. “I had to sign a fucking non-disclosure agreement with the landlord because he’s trying to sell the place,” he said. “So, I can’t give away what happened there in the past but these multiple occurrences over a short period of time made us finish the album as quickly as we could.”
Miraculously, they finished the recording and got out of there. One of the songs on the album features a riff that Grohl has been refining for the last 25 years. “The first time I demoed it was in my basement in Seattle,” he said.
The Foo Fighters, of course, are not the first band to record under supernaturally daunting circumstances. Black Sabbath infamously wrote their 1973 album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, in a haunted castle. The Red Hot Chili Peppers encountered ghosts at a building dubbed “The Mansion” while making Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Nine Inch Nails cut The Downward Spiral in the home where Sharon Tate lived at the time of the Manson massacre. And Radiohead worked on OK Computer in a house Thom Yorke described as “very haunted.”
