Between Foo Fighters records and touring cycles, Taylor Hawkins, the rock band’s anchor for nearly two decades, doesn’t like to just sit around and relax.
Instead, the 44-year-old drummer gets his artistic jollies by hunkering down in the Foos’ Studio 606 in Northridge or “the band cave,” built in the guest house of his Calabasas home. It was during these periods that he recorded a bunch of demos that eventually led to full-on releases for his side projects such as the Coattail Riders and the Birds of Satan.
With the Foo Fighters on hiatus after a lengthy tour in support of their last album, “Sonic Highways,” and the surprise dropping of their free EP “Saint Cecilia” last November, Hawkins decided to challenge himself during the break. This time around he put out an EP of short songs under his own name, for the first time, dubbed “K.O.T.A.,” which is an acronym for “King of the (Jerks),” the title of a song written for the EP that he eventually didn’t have time to finish.
The effort, which came out Friday, features Hawkins on vocals and has him playing nearly every instrument. However, he did tap the talents of Birds of Satan and Chevy Metal cover band partner Wiley Hodgden and Foo Fighters’ Nate Mendel for some for some of the bass tracks, as well as Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett for “the hard stuff” on guitar.
“It’s all these little vignettes, these real stories that I felt all just went together,” Hawkins said of the release as he kicked back in a chair at Studio 606 recently. “These records that I’ve put out, they’re really just little labors of love. They’re little signposts of that year, like what did I do that year when I wasn’t being part of the Foo Fighters?”
Hawkins expresses what it’s like to be a rock star living in the suburbs and in the same gated community as the Kardashians with his first single, “Range Rover Bitch.” And he lovingly describes what it’s like to be a father to three energetic young kids with “I’ve Got Some Not Being Around You to Do Today.”
He recalls a night of debauchery while out with his fellow Foo Fighters, Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and Rivers Cuomo of Weezer at the Lexington Queen nightclub in Tokyo in the mid-’90s in “Tokyo No No,” and inked “Southern Belles” as an ode to his parents’ Southern roots. Then there’s “Bob Quit His Job,” an upbeat, straight-up rock track that Hawkins said Foo frontman Dave Grohl called “The stupidest song I ever heard … but it’s catchy.”
“It’s about my old neighbor,” Hawkins said with a laugh. “At the very end of it, too, that’s Paul Stanley from KISS. We took some of his live banter from KISS shows off of the Internet and stuck it in there. I asked him, like, ‘Hey, I put your banter in the song to make it sound like a live KISS album or something, can I do that?’ He was like, ‘Hell yeah, go for it.’”
As an artist, Hawkins’ biggest influences are former Police drummer Stewart Copeland and Queen anchor Roger Taylor. He was attracted to the fact that not only are they both phenomenal players, but also contributed songwriting and sometimes vocals to their bands.
“Stewart Copeland wrote these crazy, weird songs on Police records that were kind of goofy, but they were great,” he said. “He couldn’t compete with Sting, but that’s all right. Roger Taylor always had a song on every Queen album and when he sang he had this kind of scratchy, cool voice, which I always did try to sound like when I was younger, which is probably why I sound like him now on accident. I always identified with that. I wanted to be in a band, but I also wanted to be with a microphone back there signing and being able to write a song every once in a while.”
When he does have some downtime, Hawkins likes to get out and mountain bike on Southern California trails or hit a beach to surf not far from where he grew up in Laguna Beach. He also enjoys hanging out at home with his wife, Alison, and their kids, all of whom seem to have taken an interest in playing drums. He also doesn’t have to worry too much about critics since it seems his biggest one resides within his own household in the form of his 9-year-old son Oliver, who often refers to his dad’s idols as “a bunch of long-haired, older men screaming like girls.”
“He hates what I listen to and says it’s ‘stupid’ or ‘old,’” Hawkins said. “That’s all right. I mean, I get it. He likes some rock music. He’ll say, ‘Yeah, I like some Foo Fighters. Dave screams, so that’s cool. I like Queen a little bit. They scream like girls, but Van Halen is cool.’ But, whatever; he listens to Drake.”
Hawkins said he remembered being that age and thinking what his parents were listening to was lame. Back then, he was running around in south Orange County with his childhood friend Jon Davison, a fellow Laguna Beach native and the current singer for rock band Yes.
“We literally started music together like on the same day,” he said. “We decided this was what we were going to do, you know, after miming to Queen’s ‘Live Killers.’ My dad took this picture of us and I remember we were standing there trying to look cool, holding a guitar and some drumsticks like ‘This is it!’ Back then, though, I wanted to play guitar or be the singer, I hadn’t found drums yet.”
It looks like the Foo Fighters hiatus won’t continue for long as Hawkins confirms the guys have been chatting about getting back at it soon as it was announced that they’d perform at the NOS Alive Festival in Portugal on July 7. The band also just launched a website, FooFightersPassport.com, which features a map of Europe and a clickable passport that has yet to be filled with dates.
Contact the writer: 714-796-3570 or kfadroski@ocregister.com
