One By One (Foo Fighters Album) - Production

Production

Following the extended tour promoting There Is Nothing Left to Lose, which kept the Foo Fighters mostly on the road between 1999 and 2001, the band started to compose songs for their next album in early 2001. After demo work on drummer Taylor Hawkins' home studio in Topanga, the band used the second quarter of 2001 to perform in European festivals. In August, after performing in London's V Festival, Hawkins suffered a heroin drug overdose that left him in a coma for two days. After taking time off to recover, during which frontman Dave Grohl accepted an offer to play drums for the Queens of the Stone Age on their album Songs for the Deaf, the band got together in October 2001 to continue composition. During November and December, they had been recording at Grohl's Studio 606 in Alexandria, Virginia, working with both the producer for their previous album, Adam Kasper, and recording engineer Nick Raskulinecz, whom they met after he had engineered "A320" for Godzilla: The Album. Raskulinecz had just left his job at Sound City Studios, and speculated that Grohl, having found difficulty in choosing someone 'who would commit to sitting in his basement for four months', eventually picked him for his energetic and enthusiastic nature.

As the progress of the Virginia sessions started to become stale, in January 2002, with six tracks finished, the band moved to Los Angeles' Conway Studios for a "change of scenery". 29 songs were recorded, including "The One"—featured in the film Orange County and released as a standalone single— and ten finished tracks that were considered for the upcoming album. The sessions took four months and were at the cost of over US$1,000,000. It was the first Foo Fighters album to use Pro-Tools and have each instrument recorded separatedly.

The recording sessions were considered unsatisfying; Hawkins said that "nobody had their studio chops together", and Grohl considered that the band was lacking enthusiasm and were too focused on production, adding that he felt the rough mixes "sucked a lot of the life out of the songs" and "soundd like another band playing our songs. Tensions were escalating, as arguments broke out at the studio, and Hawkins said he "didn't feel we were much of a band" as there was much animosity among the bandmembers. Bassist Nate Mendel said that he was in a bad attitude during the sessions due to disagreements with Grohl, and guitarist Chris Shiflett added that he felt he would at times spend whole days in the studio without playing anything.

The band also showed disappointment with the ten songs that emerged from the sessions, as Hawkins described the finished tracks as "million-dollar demos", and Grohl considered the recordings "far too clean, too tame and boring". The band only liked five of the ten songs, and thought that listeners would enjoy the other five anyway. Grohl was afraid to promote the album because of his lack of confidence in it. After manager John Silva listened to the recordings, he agreed that it was not a work that represented the band well, and that "we can release it now, but I don't know if anyone would want to buy it".

On April 2002, the band discarded the recordings and took a break. The members then each started individual projects: Grohl became the full-time Queens of the Stone Age drummer for a tour, Shiflett started the Viva Death and Jackson projects with his brother Scott and rejoined his former band Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Hawkins played with Jane's Addiction bassist Eric Avery, and Mendel both played with Juno and reunited with his former bandmate William Goldsmith in The Fire Theft. Later on April, the reunited for the Foo Fighters' scheduled concert at the 2002 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which Grohl felt could be the last the band would perform. During the rehearsals, the tensions broke out in huge fights, specially between Grohl and Hawkins. The musicians decided to at least perform in Coachella before deciding whether to continue playing together or end the band. After enjoying their performance, the bandmembers decided to remain united and returned to re-recording the album.

"We had already spent three months and a million dollars on something that we threw away. The difference between "All My Life" and "All My Life" was that this one cost a million dollars and sounded like crap, this one we did in my basement for half an hour and became the biggest fucking song the band ever had."

Grohl decided to take a two week period before the QOTSA went on tour to work on the Foo Fighters record, and after consulting Raskulinecz decided to promote him to producer. First, Grohl visited Hawkins in Topanga to rework the songs that had already been done and show new compositions, such as "Times Like These", "Low", and "Disenchanted Lullaby". Then Grohl and Hawkins went to Virginia to redo the drum, vocal and guitar tracks across a twelve day period, and Mendel and Shiflett were later called to record their parts in Los Angeles' The Hook Studios, which were mostly done with the supervision of Raskulinecz, as Grohl had to go back to QOTSA. The only remaining track from the original sessions was "Tired of You", which features a guest appearance by Queen guitarist Brian May. Two of the demos would leak online in 2012.

The title One by One—taken from a lyric on "All My Life", and for which the spelling 1 X 1 was also considered—was chosen according to Grohl because "it somehow made sense", and even worked as a reference to relationships—"one person by another person, or one after another". The singer added that the word one is frequently used in the album's lyrics, meaning either loneliness or continuation.