Things I did love: his self-deprecation, his love for his mum and sister and his pride in being a dad of girls. I got a bit bogged down in the meetings with Paul McCartney, who, fair enough, he idolises, influenced him and has been kind to him, but finding out what famous people someone has met is always going to be less fascinating than details of sharing a manky flat with Kurt Cobain. Most musicians say that their best years were during that struggle to get established, and the writing comes alive here. I mean, he swears and gets up to hijinks, but he also makes sure he acknowledges people’s positive influence in his life.Īs with any music bio, the early years of living in horrible flats and living for the music are the most engaging sections. Anyway, he’s a nice man and he thanks people and is polite throughout. I think he might have used a ghost-writer, as he thanks Carrie Thornton for being there every step of the way through his book with him, although she is primarily a high-level editor.

Grohl has been clear that this is not a standard autobiography, and so it isn’t, as he picks salient points from his life, people or experiences to write about but misses out chunks, too – he’s a private man so we don’t need to know how he met his wife, anything about his first marriage, his dealings with Courtney Love, etc., if he doesn’t want us to, obviously. I always put on my best game face, so as not to inconvenience my mother any more than life had inconvenienced her already. Of all my brushes with grievous bodily harm, I never felt physical pain in any of those moments. I will include some of Matthew’s thoughts on the audio book experience at the end.ĭave Grohl – “The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music” We think we finally started it at the beginning of December, Matthew listening to a couple of chapters on his morning walk and me reading to catch up later that day, in the customary way we read together. I had the TBR Project pretty well finished by 5 October then I had to wait for Matthew to finish his audio book so we could read this together. This also famously triggered my TBR Project last year, where I sought to get rid of all the random piles of books as well as the rest of the print TBR by the anniversary of me receiving it. I acquired this book in October 2021, and while for a short time I was only behind by a year, obviously I’m further behind again now, as looking at books acquired with it (I only know they were all in October as I posted about them in my State of the TBR November 2021 post), I have now read five out of the nine print books that came with it.

The storyteller by dave grohl