Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl delivers his third documentary with “Sonic Highways.”  BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Dave Grohl has clearly caught the music documentary bug.  In 2011, the Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer released “Back and Forth,” which traced the Foos’ history. In 2013, he unleashed “Sound City,” a look at the famed LA recording studio.  Friday brings the premiere of a more ambitious project, “Sonic Highways,” which documents — in eight episodes for HBO — the Foo Fighters’ cross-country journey to record its album of the same name, due out Nov. 10.  The band traveled to eight cities and spent a week talking, playing, and recording a song with members of each city’s musical community. Fashioning what he’s dubbed his “love letter to American music,” Grohl interviewed everyone from Dolly Parton to Ian MacKaye of Fugazi and even President Obama.  The jovial, voluble Grohl spoke with reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour about the HBO series, which premieres on Friday at 10 p.m.  On his interest in exploring the personalities and histories of recording studios on film after the release of “Back and Forth”:  I started to realize the power of music and documentary together, because a lot of the time, music can seem really one dimensional. You hear it in your car. You hear it in an elevator. It might have a catchy melody. But if you get a little bit deeper into the artist or the song, it creates this emotional connection that comes from substance and depth. So when I bought the board from Sound City, I thought, Well, I’ll just make, like, a short film about this studio and this piece of equipment, because its history is unbelievable. And to me, these recording studios are hallowed ground. They’re churches. They’re monuments to me. Some people just think they’re rooms with tubes and wires, but history has been made in these [expletives] all over the country. So I was like, We’ve got to tell this story because it will humanize the whole process and make it something that people can really connect to. . . . The response to “Sound City” was incredible. . . . sitting on an airplane, businessmen, and old ladies in the grocery store . . . everywhere I went, because it didn’t matter if you were a musician or not. It was all about being inspired to follow your passion, and that anything is possible if you really want to do it.  On his own musical evolution and how the “Sonic Highways” project was a way to refresh for the band:  When Nirvana first got popular, my father, who was a classically trained musician and a writer, he called me, and he said, “Hey, you know this isn’t going to last, right?” And I said, “No, of course. Why would it?” He’s like, “Treat every check that you get like it’s the last one you’ll ever [expletive] get.” It scared the hell out of me. That was 24 years ago. So I’ve always kind of waited for this to end so that I can get on with real life for the last 24 years. [Laughs.] And eventually I just sort of realized, Wow, well, I guess this is my real life. This is a reality. And I mean, with a series like this or with the Foo Fighters, to me it’s all about re-creating or reinventing the process. We could just go and make another record in a studio, and hit the road and sell a bunch of T-shirts. But where’s the fun in that? We’ve been a band for 20 years now. Let’s go to tiny studios all over the country, tell the story of music from that city and what is it about each one of these cities that influences the music that comes from there?  And then the challenge of the whole process is that, as you’re seeing these people talk about these cities, you see our band in the studio writing and putting a song together. And on the very last day of the session, I take my transcripts with all the interviews, and I get a bottle of wine, and I sit in my hotel room. And I read through the transcripts and take words and ideas and thoughts, and I put them on this side of the page. And on this side of the page, I have the outline of the song. And I write the song from the episode. So the finale of each episode is a performance of the song, where you realize all of these lyrical references are from the show that you just watched. It’s not like anything I’ve ever done, and it was so fun. I will never ever do it again. It was a pain in the ass.  But it was so exciting. Like I couldn’t sleep because I just wanted to write, and I wanted to play, and I wanted to interview the president. I just wanted to do all of these things that I only have a short amount of time to do. So, that’s how I roll. [Laughs.]
Foo Fighter Dave Grohl chats about his new HBO series “Sonic Highways” documenting the recording of the band’s new album.