“Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Debussy, and David Grohl.” Yes, really.

First, in this matter of “Dave Grohl”, I admit I’m like the juror for the high-profile trial– the person who had to have missed EVERYTHING in order to be impartial. But, here it goes.

Back in ’98, like everyone else in the world, I was enthralled with “Everlong.” I bought the CD that’s blue with red thingys on it, and if a CD could’ve been worn out the way vinyl gets worn out…

Soon I started my 9-5 (or, 7:30am-10pm) job, and added the grey CD. My new favorite song in the whole world became “Headwires.” I listened to those first two Foo Fighters albums all the time for the next, say, 15 years.

Then a bunch of bad stuff happened all at once.

One day I’d dropped off the kids where they needed to be, and I was sitting in a parking lot.

I was missing my blue Foo Fighters album ever since I let my husband take it on a Habitat for Humanity build and it never got home again, but I hadn’t replaced it because, hey, I can just play them through in my head whenever I want to. Well, as I was sitting there in the parking lot, reviewing some of my favorite Foo Fighters songs, I was thinking, “You know, I like the vocals and guitars a lot. But it’s really the drums that make this band. Drummers never get any credit. Maybe this drummer has worked with other bands. Maybe I’d like them just as much. I should find out. Expand my music base.” I walked into a music store, found the Foo Fighters section, and looked through the discs till I found the blue one.

After I paid for it, I took it out to my car, opened it up, and read the case liner to find the drummer. One of them was “Dave Gr… how does someone pronounce that? No wonder no one knows who he is. He should get a stage name.” I listened to the bonus tracks, and got an extra favorite song, “Dear Lover.” [There’s a certain scene in Book Three (I think I’ll name the book Syntropy, but I’m not sure yet) (edit: I think I’m naming it Entanglement) that kind of channels that song.] Ready to start researching what other bands this “Dave Grohl” person might have been in, I looked him up on Wikipedia.

“Nirvana? He was in Nirvana? But that band is SO depressing!” was my first thought. Seriously, I cannot feed that part of my psyche. It’d eat me alive. There’s no way I’d ever listen to their music on a daily basis, even though I do admire their achievement, and it’s certainly possible that, among the bands’ repertoire, are songs that I could love. That’s part of the problem, in fact. (I sometimes wonder if people who like tragedy are those who haven’t yet experienced it.)

Then I read on, and saw that David Grohl had pretty much gotten the whole band together and done all the vocals and tons of guitar for Foo Fighters, and that pretty much everyone in the world knew that except me. *Homer Simpson slap to the forehead while saying “Doh!!!”* I thought maybe I’d listen to an interview of his or something, but about three seconds into it there was swearing, so I skipped ahead a bit, and there was swearing, so I clicked way down towards the end, and there was swearing, and then I tried a different interview and got the same results, and then I realized that instead of having been upset at the lead singer for messing up some otherwise great songs by sticking stupid swear words in them, I should’ve been glad he cleaned up his language for the recording studio. Quickly, I went and got all the albums I’d been missing out on for years and years.

But here’s the thing.

The song “Walk” was precisely and exactly what I needed to hear at that time in my life. If Brother Grohl were a preacher on the pulpit, he could’ve preached that song to me. It was as if God had kept me in the dark all those years because He knew a moment was coming up that I would need exactly that song, and He made a way so I would find it at exactly the right moment.

Laugh if you want. Then think about it.

Over the next several months, things got a lot better, through a lot of learning new stuff and doing things I’d never done before that were really hard for me. One of the many results of that process was I started writing a novel.

So, yeah, that’s why I thanked David Grohl.