Foos Slip Secret Master Snippets Into New Album
Pieces of original master tapes are secretly included in copies of Wasting Light
The Foo Fighters have revealed that they cut up the original master tapes for their new album and secretly put the pieces inside CD cases.
LA Weekly apparently found a sticker on the front of their copy of the new Foo Fighters album Wasting Light that read: "A piece of the original master tape is included in this package".
After contacting Dave Grohl to confirm whether this was real, the Foos frontman revealed that it was.
Grohl said, "At the end of the session I thought it would be an extraordinary move to destroy all the masters and give the pieces of the tapes to the fans.
"So anyway, everyone was so precious about tapes, so afraid they're gonna shed or break or something will happen to them you have to be really careful with them. And that just made me want to destroy it. To prove a point to everybody to show how intangible a real tape can be. I thought, let's chop it up into a million pieces, and give it to the people who buy the album so they can hold it in their hands and see it."
In terms of what a fan might hear on each piece of tape, Grohl revealed "They'd probably get one note, or one drumbeat. I mean, the pieces of tape are like an inch by an inch piece of tape.
"We chop it up into a million f*cking pieces...if a million people got together and put it back together, they'd get a whole album."
He spoke about the decision to go fully analog, "A lot of the records you buy, there's nothing you can hold in your hand, it's all 1's and 0's, this digital cloud floating in the ether, but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand.
"There's something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that 'Everlong' is on it, or ‘Best of You' is on it, and it's really special. I say that to say you can touch it and know it's real, so we decided to chop it up and put it in the album."
"When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.
"When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine- it kinda sucks the life out of music."