Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl Pays Homage to Lionel Richie at MusiCares Tribute
Every year, the charitable Grammy organization MusiCares stages their annual Person of the Year benefit honoring legendary rockers with a salute during Grammy weekend. This year’s honoree is pop and R&B legend Lionel Richie and when the roll call of artists honoring Richie came out, some might have been surprised to see Dave Grohl on the list.
The Foo Fighters frontman is more known for his aggressive vocals more than his smooth grooves, but that didn’t stop Grohl from paying homage to a friend that few were aware that he had.
Grohl told the audience beforehand, “It’s an honor to be here for my friend Lionel Richie. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘How in the hell does Dave Grohl know Lionel Richie?’ I’ll tell you. Last summer we were on tour and I broke my leg playing a show and when I got out of surgery, I was in my hotel room and I started getting flowers and get well cards and stuff like that and one day my wife comes in the bedroom and says, ‘Wait until you see the muffin basket that just showed up.’ I said, What?’ So I went in there and this was the biggest muffin basket I’d ever seen. It was like 500 muffins this high. But I didn’t know who it was from.”
The singer continued, “A couple of days later I get a text from my tour manager and he says, ‘Hey, Lionel Richie called and wants to know if you got the muffin basket.’ So Lionel, tonight I didn’t bring you a muffin basket, I brought you this.” At that point, Grohl joined the band that had been playing behind him during his intro in singing the Richie solo favorite, “You Are.”
As you can hear in the fan-shot footage above, the song isn’t necessarily in Grohl’s range, but he sang the song with conviction before blowing a kiss as he exited the stage.
According to Rolling Stone, Jimmy Kimmel, who was playing host at the ceremony, stated, “How great was that? One of the guys in Nirvana just sang ‘You Are.’ Those must have been good muffins, Lionel.”
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