Dave Grohl Looks Back On Foo Fighters' Career With Greatest Hits

'We never intended for [the band] to become as big as it did,' Grohl says.

Back in the summer of 1995, a strange album appeared in stores. It had an odd brown cover with a comically futuristic pistol on it, and was simply labeled Foo Fighters. There was no indication that a member of one of the most important bands in history was behind it — but it's hard to imagine that anyone interested didn't know that it was the first album from ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl's new band, which, at the time, was just him.

On Tuesday (November 3), more than 14 years later, the band releases Greatest Hits, a collection of 14 of their biggest singles plus two new songs, Wheels" and "Word Forward." But this isn't Grohl and his bandmates calling it a career — rather, they see it as a way to recharge the batteries and reevaluate their future as a band.

"The last three records happened within four years, so we were constantly working," Grohl told MTV News last week. "At the end of this touring cycle, it seemed like the perfect time to take a break. We're burnt, the audience needs a break and we need to back off and regroup and re-evaluate and get it back together. But in the meantime, let's put out this thing."

Grohl said their record label has been asking them for a hits compilation for several years, but they've been so inspired to make new music that it never felt like the right time. Of course, he's kept himself busy with side-gigs throughout the band's career, whether playing drums for Tom Petty, Killing Joke or Queens of the Stone Age — or, in recent months, forming a band called Them Crooked Vultures with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and Queens' Josh Homme and Alain Johannes (that (that band will release its debut LP on November 17).

Looking back at the body of work the Foos have produced over the years makes their frontman proud — and more than a little amazed.

"It's kind of cool," he said of the album. "I look at the sequence of songs, and it's a pretty accurate representation of what's been going on with the Foo Fighters in the past 15 years. This band started sort of on a dare, and we never intended for it to become as big as it did."