Now out there as a solo singer, guitarist Chris Shiflett has quite the day job: lead guitarist in American rock icons Foo Fighters. Prior to this, he was in cult punk band Me First and The Gimme Gimmes, amongst other guises. In his most recent incarnation, Shiflett has found another niche, and gone country. 

Now three albums into a solo career that’s inspired by both Nashville and his upbringing in California, Shiflett now tours with Foo Fighters, solo, with his own band, and, on occasion, with quick shows wedged into the gaps between Foo Fighters arena-level outings. His new guise sits naturally for him,

“The change over the years hasn’t been very conscious,” Shiflett says. “I just like what I like. I’m lucky enough to have played in bands a long time, and your tastes and how you write songs evolve. In some respects, when I hear myself playing guitar back when I was a teenager, it seems like a different person, even if there is a lot of that still in me.”

“I guess I’m just lucky I’ve got to do this for so long,” he adds. “I made my last few records out in Nashville, where all the different tentacles of country music meet. Working there has been a huge influence on me. Before I made [solo debut album] ‘West Coast Town’ I made a record of all country covers, and that period had a huge impact on my songwriting. I was trying to figure out how to write like that, and I was struggling for a while. It was so foreign to me to write in a narrative, storytelling way.”

“I had a lot of failed attempts, a lot of terrible songs that no one is going to hear. Eventually I realised I was trying to write in the voice of someone playing country music in 1958. When that clicked, and I wrote in my own voice, with songs like ‘I’m Still Drunk’, when I felt like I was writing in my language, my version, and my voice.”

“It’s different to a wall of sound,” Shiflett says of the contrast with his day job. “When it’s just me with an acoustic guitar it’s really intimate, I can’t drown out the crowd. There was a time a while back when I felt like I was stagnating on guitar, and I realised I just wasn’t playing enough. So getting out a lot, recording a lot and playing a lot works for me.”

“I don’t write enough love songs,” he laughs. “I don’t write a lot of happy go lucky songs either. I’m drawn lyrically to darker topics, so I had to write a love song for my wife.” That song is ‘Overboard’, and has become shorthand in Shiflett’s house for a lazy day in watching old movies with the blind drawn. That’s typical of his songwriting now: nuanced, personal and somewhat quirky.

“A funny thing with songwriting that took me a long time to clue into is that the more specific you get, the more you’re writing for just one other person, the more people seem to relate to it,” Shiflett says. “I also learn from every interview on my Podcast [‘Shred with Shifty’, which features a heap of legends as guests, people like Nile Rogers and Rivers Cuomo]. I ask a lot of my guests, who review their songs and talk about making them. I learn a lot as part of it.”