"When I see him in my dreams, he hasn't changed a bit. He is still my best friend." How Dave Grohl channelled his heartbreak over a devastating personal loss into one of Foo Fighters' most raw, emotional songs

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."

Grohl admitted that his friend's passing "bored a hole" in his life, and affected him in the most profound way.

"A part of me died with Jimmy," he wrote. "He was more than just a person to me, he was my home... Jimmy and I had shared so many of life's firsts together. As if we were two conjoined twins separated after sharing a body for years, it was like I was alone, questioning who I was now that I was on my own."

The devastation that Grohl felt is tangible in Word Forward, not least because it's clear that, still processing the tragedy, he's painfully aware that he doesn't yet have the vocabulary to truly convey the enormity of his loss, and the depth of his feelings.

"They're just fucking words," he sings at one point. "This is life or death."

Foo Fighters have played Word Forward just three times. It received its live premiere on October 28, 2009, at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California at a taping of a VH1 Storytellers special.

"My best friend Jimmy passed away last year," Grohl told the assembled audience. "He's a guy that I've known since I was six years old, and we shared everything together. We discovered music together... discovered punk rock and underground metal, and we were brothers, you know? And when he passed away it had such a profound impact on me that I realised like, Wow that part of my life is over, you know, and now there's only one way to go, it's like, you just have to move on. And to me this song is about exactly that."

Foo Fighters: Word Forward [Uncensored] (Live at VH1 Storytellers - October 28, 2009) - YouTube

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"Every time I return to Virginia, I feel Jimmy," Grohl states in his memoir. "He is in the tress that we climbed as children, within the cracks of the sidewalks that we followed to elementary school every morning, and every fence that we jumped to take shortcuts through the neighborhood. There are times when I speak and they are his words, though its my voice. And when I see him in my dreams he hasn't changed a bit. He is still my best friend."