 Grohl's first musical performance following the demise of Nirvana was performing with The Backbeat Band at the 1994 MTV Movie Awards in June, during which he was invited by Mike Watt to take part in his album Ball-Hog or Tugboat ?. After enjoying the performance, Grohl figured he could do his own musical project, which could work as "some sort of cathartic therapy, to go out and record these songs that I'd written by myself." Grohl afterwards booked six days at Seattle's Robert Lang Studios, which were located near his house, where he would record "my favorite songs I had written in the past four, five years that no one had heard" with the assistance of producer Barrett Jones, with whom he had recorded the demo tape Pocketwatch in 1992. The idea was to have Grohl playing all instruments and release it under a name that would make people believe it was a band, similar to Stewart Copeland's Klark Kent.
