You could forgive Chris Shiflett for being a bit of dick. After all, he’s been the guitarist for rock titans Foo Fighters since 1999, and the day he chats to the BRAG is a mere two sleeps ahead of the release of his band’s ninth studio album, Concrete And Gold. And that’s not even to mention the swathes of Grammy and Kerrang! awards he and his bandmates have under their belts, or the 490,000 copies they sold of their last album, Sonic Highways.

I feel incredibly lucky to be in a band that has the draw and the reach that the Foo Fighters have

But underneath all that swagger, the band are still vulnerable to their fair share of nerves. “Whenever we’re getting ready to put a record out we always have that moment of, ‘Oh God I hope people like this!’,” laughs Shiflett. “Because you never know until it’s out there how it’s going to be received. But we all really love this album and can’t wait for everyone to hear it.”

In conversation, Shiflett is warm, friendly and a bit of a joker, and he speaks with a degree of ease. Not that that’s surprising: the man has spent the best part of his 46 years immersed in music, and he began playing the guitar before he was even in high school, joining his first band before he learned to drive. “I feel incredibly lucky to be in a band that has the draw and the reach that the Foo Fighters have,” he says. “It’s amazing that we get to travel the world and do everything we do.”

These days in his downtime, Shiflett keeps himself busy by working on new music for his country-inspired project, Chris Shiflett and the Dead Peasants, and interviewing up-and-coming artists and veteran musicians for his podcast, Walking The Floor, on which he recently interviewed Australian music great Paul Kelly. “How amazing was Paul Kelly – I love him,” he says.

Nonetheless, Shiflett says his podcast is more of a hobby – a way for him to reach out to musicians he knows and loves – than a study in how to write the perfect Foo Fighters song. “I like talking to different songwriters about how they write, but it’s more interesting than helpful because I don’t think anybody can really teach anybody else how to do that. Even the best songwriters in the world don’t really understand how they do it. There’s a trial and error, a lot of fumbling around and then something clicks and you’re like, ‘Oh there it is!’

The Foo Fighters were cranking up again before I even got started making my own record.

It was last year, just as Shiflett was ready to head into the studio with the Dead Peasants, when he got a call from the ever gung ho Grohl asking him if he was ready to come practice the songs that would eventually form the backbone of Concrete And Gold. “I remember somewhere around the beginning of last summer, Dave sent out a text or an email to all of us saying he had some new ideas, but I had actually booked some time to go off to Nashville to make a record, so I was like, ‘Woah! I don’t know,’ you know what I mean?

“The Foo Fighters were cranking up again before I even got started making my own record – but then everyone was kind of busy with summer and I wound up going to Nashville for a month. Then pretty much the day I got back, I went in to our studio to grab something and Dave was in there working on something else, and he mentioned that he had a project that he was going to work on in the fall, but that he had some new song ideas. Then a week later he called a band meeting to say the other thing didn’t end up happening, so we should start rehearsing tomorrow. So that was how that went: bam! And we’re back at it.”

Concrete And Gold is everything you’d expect from the accomplished hard rock stalwarts, and the decision to bring in the Grammy Award winning ‘Producer of the Year’ Greg Kurstin (Sia, The Shins, Lily Allen) has evidently paid off in droves.

“When we started to record the album in December we had a bunch of song ideas,” Shiflett says. “Some of them were more fleshed out than others of course, but those evolved a lot when we added Kurstin into the mix: he really took it to a different place.

“I would just sit there and pick his brain all day long about music stuff and never be bored,” he continues. “I think he had fun too. He doesn’t normally work with big, loud rock bands so he got to explore that side of himself as well, and we benefited hugely from it. Although he’s known as a pop producer, he’s got a lot of rock‘n’roll, punk rock and new wave in his past and in his quiver. I’d work with Greg again any time.”

But Shiflett isn’t ready to rush into album number ten, or keen even to speed onto the next Dead Peasants project. He is happy just to reminisce about the good times; to cast his mind back to when he very first picked up a guitar, what feels now like a lifetime ago. “I feel incredibly lucky to be able to have done this for so long – it far exceeds our wildest dreams that any of us ever had as a kid.”

Concrete And Gold is out now.

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