Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro has spoken about his grief and pain following the loss of his friend Taylor Hawkins, the late Foo Fighters drummer, and revealed that he, Hawkins, and AC/DC bassist Chris Chaney had recorded an album together before the drummer's passing.
In September '21, Navarro, Hawkins and Chaney unveiled their new band, NHC, and shared two songs, prog-tinged alt.rocker Feed The Cruel, and the more melancholic and melodic Better Move On. Both songs featured Hawkins on lead vocals.
The band performed together onstage publicly for the first time at Pearl Jam vocalist Eddie Vedder's Ohana Festival Encore weekend on October 2, 2021, and later released a performance video of Lazy Eyes, shot at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles on November 23, 2021, which also featured Foo Fighters' Pat Smear on guitar.
NHC carried on writing and recording together during the Covid pandemic, and Dave Navarro described the project as “an awakening of everything [he] loved about playing.”
In an upcoming interview with Guitar World, the guitarist reveals that NHC had actually finished their debut album, when the news of Hawkins' death broke on March 25, 2022.
“We mixed and mastered it and then, we lost Taylor,” he says. “That was in the middle of Covid, and it was actually very painful for me to pick up the guitar after that.”
“I'll be honest – I didn't pick up the guitar for about a year,” he continues. “And because he [Taylor Hawkins] was such an inspiring artist… Not only was he a phenomenal drummer, but he was also an amazing songwriter and lyricist, and he was just one of those humans that everybody loved. Everybody loved him.”
You can read the full interview with Navarro in an upcoming issue of Guitar World.
Meanwhile, Navarro's main band, Jane's Addiction, will release a new single, Imminent Redemption, on July 25.
