A week after the Foo Fighters teased disparate snippets of a new song on their website, the band has united them into “Your Favorite Toy,” a three-minute hard-rocker that’s also the title track of their upcoming 12th album. “Get back, hear that boy?” Grohl sings over a driving guitar line. “Someone threw away your favorite toy for good.” The song, which will officially come out with the rest of the 10-track album on April 24, is the sort of taut, electrifying blend of rock-for-the-sake-of-rock, Seventies-era glitter metal and power pop that Dave Grohl and company have perfected in recent decades.
“‘Your Favorite Toy’ really was the key that unlocked the tone and energetic direction of the new album,” Grohl said in a statement. “We stumbled upon it after experimenting with different sounds and dynamics for over a year, and the day it took shape I knew that we had to follow its lead. It was the fuse to the powder keg of songs we wound up recording for this record. It feels new.”
The band recorded the album, which includes the previously released “Asking for a Friend,” at home with co-producer Oliver Roman. It’s the band’s first recording since new drummer Ilan Rubin joined the lineup.
Your Favorite Toy will arrive two weeks before the group performs at the Welcome to Rockville festival in Daytona Beach, Florida, on May 8. They’ll also play Bottlerock Napa Valley on May 23 before embarking on a run of European dates. The Foos will return to North America for an Aug. 4 gig at Toronto’s Rogers Stadium with gigs running through late September. Queens of the Stone Age and Mannequin Pussy are the support acts for most of the shows.
Your Favorite Toy track list:
1. “Caught in the Echo”
2. “Of All People”
3. “Window”
4. “Your Favorite Toy”
5. “If You Only Knew”
6. “Spit Shine”
7. “Unconditional”
8. “Child Actor”
9. “Amen, Caveman”
10. “Asking for a Friend”
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
Editor’s picks
The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far
The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
100 Best Movies of the 21st Century
In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
Trending Stories
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
Watch Hilary Duff's Intimate Performance of 'Roommates' on 'Fallon'
Rihanna Shooting Suspect Held for Attempted Murder on $10.2 Million Bail
Amy Klobuchar Slams Live Nation Settlement: 'Every Sign Points to a Backroom Deal'
He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.