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The Content Strategist
BRANDS
5 Storytelling Lessons From the
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Foo Fighters’ Sonic Highways
Written by Camille Padilla Dalmau
Image by Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways
JANUARY 6TH, 2015
The traditional gift on your twentieth wedding anniversary is china. But when
the Foo Fighters turned 20, the band’s founder, frontman, and lead guitarist
Dave Grohl didn’t get his bandmates fancy plates. Instead, he decided to direct
and produce Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways, an eight-part HBO docu-series that
follows the trajectory of the band as they recorded their album of the same
name. Each episode culminates with a song that lyrically references a specific
American city and its music scene, since each of the album’s songs was
recorded in a different studio in a different city.
While the series has received both praise and criticism, its storytelling is
undeniably successful. Here are some of the lessons we can learn from Sonic
Highways:
1. Have a defined goal
Grohl, the son of a Washington, D.C. reporter told Rolling Stone, “It’s written
in my DNA that I like to sit down and talk to people and their experiences.” It
makes sense, then, that Grohl had one goal from the start: Tell the story of
American music. In order to do this he travelled to Chicago, Washington D.C.,
Nashville, Austin, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City. “I
believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political
because it’s changed generations of people,” he added.
One of Grohl’s first interviews—but one that, paradoxically, comes in the
series’ last episode—was with music producer Steve Rosenthal, who offered an
emotion-laced view on the state of music and gentrification.
“I looked at my interview with Steve like the message of this entire project—
we’re all connected by something,” Grohl said. “Maybe it’s a river that runs
underground, maybe it’s Woody Guthrie, maybe it’s Chuck D. That
conversation became my goal.”
2. Let experts move the story
When Grohl interviewed Ben Jaffe, creative director of the famous Preservation
Hall in New Orleans, he said, “I don’t know shit about jazz, and I don’t know
shit about New Orleans. We’re rolling.”
Grohl, obviously enough, is not afraid to admit a lack of knowledge about
something. He told Rolling Stone, “I love talking about music and hearing these
stories, but I also love not knowing everything. The interviews turned into
conversations that turned into lessons.”
This approachable, borderline laissez-faire attitude made his sources feel
comfortable. They didn’t have to impress Dave Grohl; they just had to be
honest and tell their story. On the show, Grohl’s narration introduces, ties
together, and concludes each story, but we—the audience—learn by hearing
the producers and musicians interviewed.
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3. Think of your audience
When I watch Sonic Highways, I feel like I’m Dave Grohl for a second, as if it’s
me who’s having these intimate conversations with Pharrell Williams, Dolly
Parton, and Willie Nelson. This, of course, was Grohl’s intention. “In a lot of
these interviews, I imagine myself as the viewer because the intention of the
entire project was to inform people,” he explained, “not just tell them
something they already knew.”
But how did he put everything together?
4. Find a common structure
When Grohl finished recording, there were over 1,000 hours of footage. How,
we wonder, could someone who had never produced a show fit all that into nine
hours? American music is obviously the overarching theme of the series, but
the genres it covers range from jazz to punk.
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What brings consistency to each episode is its structure.
The pattern is as follows: Story of the city by its musicians and producers,
history of the studio where they’re recording, Grohl’s affiliation with the city,
final thoughts and lessons learned, and bam, a new song for the Sonic
Highways album is born. The order is not always the same, but the elements
are always present.
5. End with a bang
Introducing the New York episode, Grohl said, “Now, there’s only really one
place to go.” It’s important to have an epic conclusion—and, indeed, the last
episode does the series justice. Not only do you realize how much amazing
and diverse music has been recorded in New York City—from soul in the ’40s
to rock in the ’70s to hip-hop in the ’90s—you learn from Woody Guthrie’s
daughter, Nora Guthrie, that her father wrote “This Land Is Your Land” in New
York City after a road trip through the U.S.
Grohl ended the series with an interview with President Barack Obama, who
talked about Bob Dylan and music in the U.S. “There’s nothing more unifying
in this country,” Obama said, “than our music.”
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