Nirvana’s three surviving members - Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear - have recorded ‘really cool’ new music together, but the world may never hear it.
The three musicians have reunited on stage a number of times since Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain passed away in April 1994, recruiting Joan Jett, Kim Gordon, St. Vincent and Lorde to front their performance at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame ceremony in April 2014, and making a surprise appearance, with Deer Tick’s John McCauley and Jett again, at the Foo Fighters’ Cal Jam festival in October 2018. Speaking to Howard Stern on June 8, Dave Grohl revealed that the trio have also recorded new music together during their occasional jam sessions, but that there is no expectation that this music will ever be shared with the world.
‘Krist Novoselic is a pilot, he flies his own plane… he lives up in the Pacific Northwest and whenever he comes down to Los Angeles, you know, we always love to see each other and we’ll have dinner,’ Grohl said. ‘Last time he was here I made dinner for us and we hung out. and Pat‘s always around and the three of us, you know we like to just, we like to be together. We like to see each other and if there are instruments around or a studio that’s available, we’ll just get together and kind of jam, you know?’
‘We don’t like run through a big old Nirvana setlist but we do like to fool around and sometimes as we’re fooling around, songs happen. And you know if we’re in a studio we’ll record them. So we’ve recorded some stuff that’s really cool. But we’ve never done anything with it… it’s more just like friends, jamming around, it doesn’t really seem like any sort of like big official reunion.’
Asked if he sings during these jam sessions, Grohl replied, ‘Well no I’m just playing the drums. We don’t have a singer. So, it’s like we kind of record these instrumentals and, and just mess around. It’s very casual. There’s no pressure on us to do something that the world will have to hear it’s more really just for fun, and a lot of it’s really cool’
‘It reminds you that, that when the three of us get together in a room and start playing, It sounds like it did. It sounds like it used to. When we put the three of us in a room and it makes that noise, it still does.’
Also on June 8, Grohl’s Foo Fighters were announced as the first band who'll perform at New York’s legendary Madison Square Garden since March 2020. The band will perform to a fully vaccinated audience on June 20, at what will be the first full-capacity gig at the Manhattan venue in more than 460 days.
“We’ve been waiting for this day for over a year, and Madison Square Garden is going to feel that hard,” Dave Grohl said.
