Foo Fighters Hollywood Bowl Rarities Include a Song Unplayed Since 2006

Three songs that had almost vanished from the live canon surfaced when the Foo Fighters Hollywood Bowl appearance on 22 August delivered one of the more unusual sets the band has assembled in years. Performing a one-off concert with the L.A. Philharmonic, the group pulled out ‘Razor’, ‘Home’ and ‘I Should Have Known’, rarities whose collective absence from setlists runs to decades rather than seasons.

The Rarities: How Rare Is Rare?

The answer, in at least one case, is very. According to Setlist.fm, ‘Razor’, taken from the 2005 double album In Your Honor, had been played just 27 times in the band’s entire career before this show, and had not appeared at a live performance since 2006. Grohl addressed the crowd directly before launching into it. ‘This is definitely something that we haven’t done in, oh my god, 15, 20 years? I don’t know. A long time,’ he said. ‘I practiced it this morning. Do we have some OG Foo Fighters fans out there? I recognize most of you. This song goes out to the OGs.’

‘Home’, from Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, had a stranger recent history still. The song had not appeared at a public show since 2007, though it resurfaced briefly at a live-streamed virtual reality concert in 2022, making that its sole airing in the previous 19 years before this Hollywood Bowl performance. ‘I Should Have Known’, from the 2011 record Wasting Light, rounded out the trio of recoveries, returning to a setlist for the first time since 2012.

The band were further augmented throughout the evening by a choir dressed in multi-coloured robes, lending some of the more familiar material a scale you don’t often encounter at a rock show. That the Foo Fighters Hollywood Bowl rarities landed within such a setting gave even the deep-catalogue choices a certain grandeur, though Grohl’s nervy preamble before ‘Razor’ suggested the songs hadn’t exactly been kept warm in rehearsal.

The Occasion: Honouring Gustavo Dudamel

The concert was arranged as a tribute to Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel, who is departing the orchestra after a tenure that began in 2009, according to the New York Philharmonic. That amounts to 17 years at the helm of one of America’s foremost orchestras. Dudamel is moving to a comparable role with the New York Philharmonic: during the 2025–26 season he takes the title of Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Music and Artistic Director Designate, before formally becoming the orchestra’s Music and Artistic Director in September 2026.

It was not the first time Grohl had shared a stage with Dudamel. The two collaborated at Coachella in 2025, a pairing that evidently established enough of a working rapport to bring the Foo Fighters back for this more formal send-off. There is something pleasingly contrary about a band whose career was built on a certain deliberate abrasiveness choosing to mark the occasion by exhuming songs their own fanbase had largely stopped expecting to hear.

The Foo Fighters Hollywood Bowl show sits within a broader schedule of activity for the band, who are currently taking a short break from their Take Cover stadium tour. The tour resumes on 4 September with a performance at Rock in Rio in Brazil. Later in September, on the 18th, the group are also set to open a one-off show for AC/DC in St. Louis.

For anyone who has followed the band’s setlist habits over the years, the reappearance of these three songs carries its own particular weight. ‘Razor’ returning for just its 27th ever performance, nearly two decades after its last outing, is the kind of detail that puts Foo Fighters Hollywood Bowl rarities in a different category from the usual anniversary-tour nostalgia trawl. Whatever the occasion demanded, the band clearly went searching in places they don’t normally look.