Following the recent untimely passing of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, I can’t help but feel somewhat bittersweet in my appreciation of this Grammy-winning production’s rhythmic invention. Although the tempo remains notionally around 91bpm throughout, we get three contrasting grooves within that framework. The song kicks off broadly in 3/4, albeit with a few syncopated kick subdivisions, and then at 0:59 the prechorus moves into 4/4. But after the kick downbeat, the snare drum plants itself directly on the following seven beats, with the kick on the off-beats, the next kick downbeat only appearing at the beginning of bar three. Because this happens three times in succession, the result is almost like the section moves into 8/4.

Then the chorus arrives with a snare backbeat that initially suggests a simple 4/4 pattern, but in practice the combined rhythmic stress of the kick, guitars, and vocals all piling onto the first and fourth eighth notes transforms it into more of a 3+3+2 additive metre. Until the last two bars, that is, when the vocal lyric “time” lands squarely on beat three (an eighth note behind the bass and guitars’ stress point) and the kick anticipates the downbeat by landing heavily on the bar’s final eighth note. This leaves the chorus’s last bar without a downbeat, providing a delicious little one-drop rhythmic vacuum from which the on-beat stresses of Hawkin’s drum fill on beats two, three, and four lead us back into the more straightahead stomp of the 3/4 section.

But my favourite bit is when we reach the middle section at 2:36, where after four bars of the 3/4 groove, we go into the third prechorus, but instead of teetering on the brink of 8/4 as before, this time the drums riff on the 3+4+3+2+2+2 pattern from the final two bars of the chorus. It’s almost like they heard me thinking “that’s a cool bit!” earlier in the song, and obliged me by trotting out a few extra iterations – crowd-pleasing stuff!