On November 3, 2009, Foo Fighters released their first compilation album.
"These 16 songs are what we're calling our 'Greatest Hits'," Dave Grohl wrote for the album's sleevenotes. "Not to be confused with 'Our Best Songs' or 'Our Favorite Songs', it is a collection of the songs that have defined our band's identity to most people over the years."
Of the 16 tracks on the record, 14 would be familiar to even the most casual fan of Grohl's band, songs such as Everlong, Learn To Fly, Times Like These and Best Of You already staples of radio and streaming service playlists. The collection also featured two new recordings, the first of these, Wheels, shared as a single ahead of the album release, offered a hint as to where Foo Fighters might be heading over the next 15 years.
But it would be the second new song, Word Forward, which would be the album's emotional peak, and arguably the most raw and heartfelt song that Dave Grohl had ever written. Introduced by the simple lyric "Goodbye Jimmy, farewell youth", the song is a eulogy for Jimmy Swanson, Grohl's best friend since childhood, who died from a drug overdose the previous year.
"I’d known him since I was six years old," Grohl told USA Today. "We lived two blocks away from each other in Virginia. Our whole lives, we shared everything."
"I learned of Jimmy's death from the bedside phone in my Oklahoma City hotel room on the morning of July 18, 2008," Grohl wrote in his 2021 memoir The Storyteller. "He had passed in his sleep in the same North Springfield house where we had discovered the world of music together as kids, on the same couch where we would watch MTV for hours, dreaming of some day experiencing the lives of the famous musicians we admired."
