Foo Fighters' Chris Shiflett on his new solo album: "My entry into country was a lot of the West Coast Stuff"

Next month finds Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett hitting Ireland for a brace of dates in support of his country-tinged solo album Lost At Sea. Despite the Foos’ busy touring schedule, it seems Shiflett is always keen to squeeze in his own solo output.

“Over the years, I’ve always worked on music in one form or another,” says the friendly Chris, over Zoom from his LA home. “With our touring schedule, it’s pretty easy to slot in the odd show here and there. We were recently down in Texas for a week, and I did a couple of gigs in Austin on the side. You have a lot of nights off, and you’re either sitting in your hotel room, or you’re off playing music to a roomful or people. It’s like, which one would you rather do?”

Well, I venture, it depends what the hotel’s like.

“That’s true,” laughs Chris. “Sometimes you book a side gig a few months out, and then on the night, you’re so tired you just want to climb into bed and read a book. You have to go, ‘Well, I better find some energy here!’”

On the morning I talk to Chris, he’s only just got back from the latest leg of the Foo Fighters’ tour in Australia. He must be totally wrecked.

“I am pretty wrecked right now!” he acknowledges. “I’m pretty jet-lagged, but I’m in that jet-lag bubble where the first night you get home from anywhere, you’ve had a long travel day. You’re tired and you’ve been out on tour, so that first night is easy. Last night I went to bed and had a good night’s sleep. Tonight and the next night will be the difficult ones, so you caught me right in that bubble.”

I admit some surprise at the country leanings of Lost At Sea, and I wonder how many Foo Fighters fans fit into my category – that of the rock aficionado who rarely listens to country.

“You’d be surprised at how often I hear that!” chuckles Chris. “I get non-country fans going, ‘Why are you into country music?’ But the way I look at it, country music is such a big tent, there’s so much there. I often hear from people – even my own wife! – that they’re not into country music, but then they’ll love Steve Earle or something. I’m going, ‘No, you actually do like country!’

“All genres kind of meet at the edges, so there’s a lot of overlap. If you’re a Stones fan, that’s kind of how I got into country – it was through rock and roll, and the Stones were a big part of that. You would never call them a country band, but there were songs like ‘Dead Flowers’ and ‘Faraway Eyes’ which dabbled in it. That was kind of my entry point.”

Shiflett actually grew up California, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be soaked in country and roots music.

“But in fact you are, and that’s the thing,” he counters. “I didn’t really understand that when I was growing up, how deep in our culture it is here. Some of the greatest country music ever made was made here in Hollywood at Capitol Records. All those great Buck Owens and Merle Haggard records, they were all done right here with Ken Nelson producing.

“There’s a lot of bits and bobs here to cover, but when you think of California and the whole west coast back in the day, it was where the rest of the country was escaping to. There was the Gold Rush, and the Depression was really the big one. So you had all these people from the Midwest, the South and all over the country, who were struggling and coming to the west coast to find the land of milk and honey.”

It meant roots music seeped into Californian culture.

“They brought their music with them,” Chris continues, “and you had this really rich country music scene all up and down the west coast, with barn dances everywhere. At the same time, you had this thing with Hollywood making all those old westerns with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. That reflected back on the country music of the time.

“The reason Hank Williams wore those crazy outfits was not because he was riding his horse to the Grand Ol’ Opry, it was because he wanted to look like Gene Autry. So the west coast, in a way, does have this deep country music history, even though nowadays it’s not really viewed that way. Nashville understandably is the hub of the country music business, with the recording and musicians. It’s where you go to make it in that genre.

“But my entry into country was a lot of the west coast stuff, and it was there when I was growing up, even if I didn’t notice it. I only understood that looking back.”

I explain the wild popularity of country music in Ireland to Chris, and even touch on the controversy around Garth Brooks’ planned run of Croke Park shows a decade ago. One country figure who unites many musical tribes is the great Johnny Cash – was Chris a fan growing up?

“He was just such a superstar,” he reflects. “Even as a little kid listening to Kiss, I knew who Johnny Cash was. I knew at least some of his music, just from it being in the ether. I had a compilation cassette of his Sun Records recordings, the really early stuff that was country, but it was also kinda rockabilly. That was probably the first Johnny Cash record I ever had, when I was around 18.

“It was a little later that he did a record with Willie Nelson, which was a VH1 Storytellers show, and it was just the two of them playing acoustic guitars. That was the one that really resonated with me. He was playing these stripped back versions of all his old songs. That would have been sometime in the ’90s, but that was really the jump-off point.

“There was just something so pure about that record. It was that voice, with that simple guitar behind it, that really hit home with me. When you strip it back like that, you hear those words and the resonance of his voice. Something about it was just magic.”

Lost At Sea was recorded in Nashville – how did Shiflett find working in the city?

“It’s fantastic,” he enthuses. “You can’t beat the talent pool, in terms of the musicianship. Also the songwriting and all the folks who work in the studios, the engineers and producers. I’ve never lived in Nashville and I never moved there to make it in music. I can’t really speak to what that experience would be. I would say I came in through the side door.

“I’ve made a lot of friends there over the years. I don’t know representative my experience is, but I know a long list of amazing players out there. All of the people who played on my new record were such a big part of it turning out the way it sounds. It just wouldn’t be the record it is without Charlie Worsham, Jerry Roe, Nathan Ketterle and all the guys.

“And especially Jaren Johnson from Cadillac Three, who produced the record and had a massive impact on it. Not just in the production – he also helped me write a bunch of the songs, and his creative input really helped guide it. Cos any time you’re making a record, it’s easy to get lost in it. You need that steady hand to reassure you in those moments of doubt.”
Where did you squeeze this album in, bearing in mind the Foos’ schedule?

“Well I was writing most of those songs during lockdown, in 2020 and 21,” explains Shiflett. “We started recording in the spring of 21, right about the same time live shows were starting to open up again. Right after we recorded the first couple of songs was when Foo Fighters started doing shows. But 2021 was not a normal tour year, things were just kind of opening up and it was different everywhere.

“It was like throwing darts at a map, going, ‘Oh, we can over here and do a couple of shows, then we can go to Alaska and play.’ So it was unusual and things were coming at you quickly – our schedule was in a constant state of flux. So after doing those first couple of songs in the spring, I went back in summer and did five, then came back in the fall and did another three. Each time we did it, I would take that stuff back to LA and tinker with it.

“I’d send it to Jared, then he would take it into his studio and do the same. So over the course of that year, we got everything recorded and where we wanted it to be, then sent it off to get mixed. Overall, it took about a year. At the same time as my schedule was getting busy, so was Jared’s, cos Cadillac Three were touring again. I’d literally fly out to Nashville for two days and we’d bang out as much as we could.”

A couple of years ago in February 2022, I actually interviewed Foos main man Dave Grohl about the band’s comedy-horror flick, Studio 666. Sadly, it wasn’t long after that tragedy struck, when the Foos much-loved drummer, Taylor Hawkins, passed away when the band were touring in Colombia. Understandably, Chris is hesitant to discuss the whole period.

“It’s really tough to talk about,” he says. “I honestly just try to avoid talking about it, it’s hard to even find the words. Every time I do talk about it, I just get misquoted. Not to say that you would, but it always gets chopped up into clickbait. There’ll be a time to discuss that whole period and everything since in detail, but I honestly don’t even know how to yet.”

Returning to his solo work, has he played many solo dates in Ireland before?

“A little bit,” nods Chris. “I have done a couple of shows in Dublin. In 2019, I started a tour there, and just this past spring we started a tour there, and it was fantastic. I had gotten a lot of people commenting on social media saying, ‘Come to Belfast!’ So we added Belfast this time and we’re doing both cities. It’s exciting.

“I would love some day to do a whole tour of Ireland. But I’m always squeezing things into little pockets. It’s like, ‘I’ve got a week, let’s go and do as many shows as I can!’ But the shows have always been really good over there, so I’m excited for it. Also, I would really love to over and support a bigger artist sometime… Maybe I can tap into that Garth Brooks market!”

• Lost At Sea is out now. Chris Shiflett plays the Academy, Dublin on March 20 and the Limelight, Belfast (21).