Top 17 Taylor Hawkins Quotes

I’ve been lucky enough to have fulfilled so many ambitions, and gone way past anything I ever thought I would do. I could never have imagined the career that I’ve had with the Foo Fighters – playing stadiums and having songs on the radio. It’s amazing, and my goal is really just to carry on playing.

I think that debut albums are supposed to sound sort of raw. You don’t want to record ‘Sgt. Pepper‘s’ as your first album, because where do you go from there?

I’ve worked hard, but this business can be tough, and I just consider myself incredibly lucky to have had the career that I have, and to still be having so much fun playing drums and making music.

I don’t like guitar solos that are like, ‘Look at me, look at me!’ I like guitar solos that are little songs within the songs.

I know I’m not Freddie Mercury or Ann Wilson, and that’s okay. You don’t have to be a great singer to sing rock and roll. That’s not what it’s about.

‘Boy,’ ‘October,’ ‘War,’ ‘The Unforgettable Fire‘ and ‘The Joshua Tree,’ those records, they’re part of my musical DNA and structure.

I only started playing piano because I had chickenpox when I was about 14 and wasn’t allowed to play my drums for a whole week… We had a piano in the house, so I just sat down and played that instead.

I love Donna Summer, and I love ABBA. I love late ’70s disco. I love the Bee Gees. I just love that period of recording.

The drummer is stereotypically the dumb guy. Maybe that’s why I always respect drummers who do more than drum.

I used to dress like Roger Taylor when I was ten because I thought he was cool. In high school, I used to dress like Stephen Perkins from Jane‘s Addiction because I thought he was cool. You just want to be those guys when you’re that age.

I don’t take breaks, man. In the past, I used to spend my free time getting in trouble, and now I spend it working on my music. If I’m not playing drums with my cover band, Chevy Metal, I’m working on songs for myself.

I don’t have perfect pitch. My drums sound like a drummer, not a drum machine.

The records that I grew up listening to had feel, and the drummers that inspired me – like Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Phil Collins and Roger Taylor – all had their own voice and individual style.

In hindsight, if I could go back in time and relay a message to my younger self, I would tell him to work on his time keeping, and that the job of a drummer is not to be the one that gets noticed the most on stage, or to be the fastest, or the loudest. Above all, it is to be the timekeeper.

In the studio you can auto tune vocals, and with drums, you can put them on a grid and make them perfect. I hate that sound. When someone hands me a record and the drums are perfectly gridded and the vocals are perfectly auto tuned, I throw it out the window. I have no interest in rock music being like that.

Life is funny. If you don’t laugh, you’re in trouble.

The Alanis Morissette tour, everybody thinks that was all sitting around, lighting candles and talking intelligently about synergy and big words. That band was so gnarly. We were such scumbags. Alanis had no idea. We were like Van Halen.