Foo Fighters‘ rocking 2007 single “The Pretender” recently got some extra recognition when the masked vocalist known as the Piglet on The Masked Singer rocked it out to a highly energized panel of judges on the FOX series. As it was later revealed, the Piglet was none other than pop star and 98 Degrees singer Nick Lachey, who says he reached out to Dave Grohl before the performance.
“I’m a huge fan of rock — huge Zeppelin fan, huge Foo Fighters fan — and ironically, Dave Grohl’s kids and my kids went to school together,” revealed Lachey to Yahoo. “So I know Dave and I wanted to do that song, and I went to him and said, ‘Hey man, would you, would you bless this?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, man — but you gotta kill it!’”
The singer says, “I definitely felt the pressure to go out there and do it some justice. … I was afraid he was going to say no, and I kind of put that disclaimer, like, ‘Hey man, I totally get it if you don’t want to do this, but I gotta ask, would you clear this for me?’ And he said, ‘I’m calling management now. Done. Just make sure you kill it.’ So, I get my marching orders from Dave, and I tried my best to go out there and kill it.”
Asked if he heard Dave’s response after the performance, Lachey said, “Well, he said he liked it! But what’s he going to say to me, ‘You butchered it’? He still speaks to me, so I have to assume I didn’t do it too bad. … It’s always been one of my favorite songs of theirs, and it was just a way do something different that we hadn’t seen on The Masked Singer before, like a heavy, hard-hitting rock song. And sung by a piglet with a spinning propeller. What gets better than that?”
“The Pretender” hit No. 1 on both the Mainstream Rock and Alternative Airplay charts and was the lead single from Foo Fighters 2007 album, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace. It’s a double-platinum single as certified by the RIAA in the U.S.