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I'm excited for the new Foo Fighters album, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, which will hit stores September 25.

The Foo Fighters are a band I have always kept with me. Ever since the end of Nirvana, I followed what Dave Grohl and Pat Smear and half of Sunny Day Real Estate, whoever they were, put together (I like SDRE a lot, by the way). I loved the self-titled album that Dave Grohl released when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I bought my first ever band t-shirt with a glow-in-the-dark alien head on the front and the Roswell Records logo on the back. And The Colour and the Shape and There Is Nothing Left to Lose which followed were always, always in my CD Walkman. When my mom was taking summer classes at Kent State University, I would go with my dad every weekend in the family's Mercury Villager to pick her up or take her back. Ignore that I was a mama's boy. Middle school was really, really terrible for me. Anyway, on those drives, I would always play The Colour and the Shape, and that CD was one of the few things I had in the world besides SportsCenter and homework. Seriously, I was miserable. I loved that album, though. It made me forget about being abnormal.

There Is Nothing Left to Lose was released during my freshman year of high school, and I probably listened to it in its entirely at least four times a week. It was a really hopeful-sounding record, and I was feeling that and learning to live without misery.

I didn't buy One by One, but I own it because I have a borrowed copy that I'm never returning. I don't know that record as well, but highlights include "Low," which has a great vibe to it. In Your Honor, the Foos' most recent release featuring a second disc of acoustic songs, went largely unheard by me since I bought it until the past few months. I didn't listen to CDs very often in college because I really didn't have the time, so I mostly had the same one or three playing in my 1991 Civic whenever I drove. Now it's a different story, and the layers of sound on In Your Honor make for a great record. Some of the songs remind me of moments from The Colour and the Shape and There Is Nothing Left to Lose, the high-energy mixed so well with the sweet and sober.

The band grows over every release, their sound evolving and encompassing more and more moods and effects, but there's always something uniquely Foo Fighters through all of it, whatever that means. Dave's voice, in particular, by The Colour and the Shape, showed such a versatility that I knew I was going to love this band for good. Change and versatility and returning to the original energy of Foo Fighters has kept the band's music flowing and true to life. And it's hard to think now that Taylor and Chris weren't originally Foo Fighters.

Some bands are great because they are so groundbreaking and line-blurring that they cannot be easily categorized. Foo Fighters are great because they are exactly what I would give as my example of rock music.