Foo Fighters have been nominated in six categories in the 54th Annual GRAMMY Awards, including Album of the Year.
In addition to the evening’s highest honor, Wasting Light is also nominated for Best Rock Album, while its current single “Walk” is up for Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song and album track “White Limo” is a contender for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance. In addition, the band’s acclaimed documentary Foo Fighters: Back and Forth has been nominated for Best Long Form Music Video. Finally, Foo Fighters colleagues racked up two related nominations, with Butch Vig up for Producer of the Year for his work on Wasting Light and the Deadmau5 remix of “Rope” up for Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical.
Should Foo Fighters sweep the above categories when the GRAMMYs air live from the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 12, 2012, the band would double its career GRAMMY tally from six to twelve. The Foos’ previous GRAMMY wins have included three for Best Rock Album (There Is Nothing Left To Lose; One By One; Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace), two Best Hard Rock Performances (“All My Life”; “The Pretender”) and one Best Short Form Music Video (“Learn To Fly”).
Speaking from Melbourne, Australia where Foo Fighters are in the midst of a sold out stadium tour, Dave Grohl said, “We’re totally honored and blown away at the six nominations for Wasting Light! It’s nice to know that we live in a world where an album made in a garage, entirely to analog tape, with no help from computers, can be nominated for Album of the Year. Long live Rock and Roll!”
The half dozen 2011 GRAMMY nominations are yet another peak in possibly the most phenomenal year of Foo Fighters’ 16-year career to date: The path leading to the nominations began in earnest with the April release of Wasting Light, the band’s seventh studio album and first to hit #1 in its native U.S.–also debuting at #1 in eleven other countries including the UK where it ended Adele’s 11-week run atop the albums chart, and Australia and New Zealand where it has had the biggest first week digital album sales in both country’s chart histories.
2011 has also seen Foo Fighters receive the most positive critical notices of the band’s 16-year career including a 4-star lead review in Rolling Stone calling Wasting Light “the best Foos album since the first two,” as well as the band’s sixth Saturday Night Live appearance, first performance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the theatrical and televised premiere of the Foo Fighters: Back and Forth documentary (directed by Academy Award winner James Moll), and a still-ongoing world tour that included a sold out return to Madison Square Garden, two SRO nights at the L.A. Forum and a 130,000 capacity July 2-3 headline engagement at the Milton Keynes Bowl in the UK.
More recently, the Sam Jones-directed clip for Wasting Light single “Walk” took Best Rock Video honors at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards.