Watch Foo Fighters Talk ‘Sonic Highways’ in New Extended Trailer

Foo Fighters’ HBO series Sonic Highways premieres Friday, October 17th, and now we have another extensive look at what we can expect to see and hear from Dave Grohl’s eight-episode musical travelogue. The five-minute trailer also reveals many of diverse guest stars that are a stop along Sonic Highways: Willie Nelson, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Kiss’ Paul Stanley and the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Dolly Parton, just to name a few. The night before the series premiere, the Foo Fighters will also unveil the album’s first single “Something From Nothing.”

“Basically, the process is we come to a city and we spend a week and we start recording an instrumental, because I interview all of these different musicians from that city,” Grohl says. Next, the Foo frontman takes those interviews and transforms them into song lyrics. “I talk about the regional relevance of the music from that city, the cultural influence, that ‘made-for-the-sound’ of the music,” Grohl adds. “There’s no way that you can tell the history of a city’s music in one hour, so we have to do it in a way that relates to the band and goes from point A to point B and becomes a song.”

Each of the eight episodes concludes with the finished product of the Sonic Highways song the city inspired. As for their location picks, “Mostly we wanted to pick cities that meant something to us, so there’s Seattle, where Dave made the first Foo Fighters record plus his history with Nirvana,” guitarist Pat Smear says in the trailer. Grohl also reveals that while recording in Chicago, the Foo Fighters recorded with producer Steve Albini, who also worked on Nirvana’s In Utero. Washington, D.C. was visited because it’s Grohl’s home turf. The Foo Fighters visit famous recording studios in New York, Seattle, Nashville, Los Angeles and Austin to round out their trip.

Sonic Highways the series will run for eight weeks, but halfway through the journey, on November 10th, the Butch Vig-produced Sonic Highways will arrive. The Foo Fighters will also celebrate their new HBO series with a weeklong musical residence on The Late Show With David Letterman.