I was able to finish one of my pending task of watching this year’s The South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conferences’ Keynote Speech over the weekend.

And I found a new hero after watching it. This year’s speaker was Nirvana and Foo Fighter fame Dave Grohl.

1) He is one of the best drummers of modern era. This guy will blow your mind (start at 2:15)

“Eventually I figured out how to be a one-man band. I took my crappy old handheld tape recorder, hit record and laid down a guitar track. I would then take that cassette, place it in the home stereo, take another cassette, place THAT into the handheld recorder, hit play on the stereo, record on the handheld, and play drums along to the sound of my guitar. Voila! Multi-tracking! At 12 years old! To my chagrin, though, what I got was not “Sgt. Peppers” . . . rather a collection of songs about my dog, my bike, and my dad”

“So I joined a band, dropped out of high school, and hit the road. I starved. My hands bled. If I slept, I slept on floors. I slept on stages. I slept on the fucking floors under the fucking stages. And I loved every minute of it. Because I was free.”

“Fourteen songs in five days, with one day to mix. I played every instrument, running from the drums, to the guitar, to the coffee maker, to the bass, to the vocal mike, to the coffee maker, back to the drums, back to the coffee maker . . . here I was again, left to my own devices, with no one to tell me right or wrong, the same one-man band 20 years later, multi-tracking all on my own.”

“Guilt. Guilt is cancer. It will confine you, torture you, destroy you as a musician. It is a wall. It is a black hole. It is a thief. It will keep you from YOU. Remember learning your first song, or riff, or writing your first lyric? There was no guilt then. Remember when there WAS no right or wrong? Remember the simple reward of just . . . playing music? You are still, and will always be that person at your core. The musician. And, The musician comes first.”

‘What matters most is your voice,’ urges the rocker. ‘Cherish it. Respect it. Stretch it and scream until it’s gone’

+Dave Grohl +Foo Fighters +SXSW +Nirvana