As they did last year, Dave Grohl and Greg Kurstin are celebrating Hanukkah with “The Hanukkah Sessions,” a series of covers featuring songs originally by Jewish artists. For yesterday’s installment, the fourth in this year’s batch, the Foo Fighters leader and Foo Fighters producer decided to take on a Van Halen classic, “Jump.”
Grohl wrote while sharing the cover, “Quite possibly the loudest and proudest of hard rocking Jews, @DavidLeeRoth has gone on record crediting his Bar Mitzvah preparation as his earliest vocal training. He became a rockstar the day he became a man: Diamond Dreidel DLR and @VanHalen…with ‘Jump.’”
Quite possibly the loudest and proudest of hard rocking Jews, @DavidLeeRoth has gone on record crediting his Bar Mitzvah preparation as his earliest vocal training. He became a rockstar the day he became a man: Diamond Dreidel DLR and @VanHalen…with “Jump.”#happyhanukkah pic.twitter.com/9w73lP0Wco
— Foo Fighters (@foofighters) December 1, 2021
With Kurstin on the keyboard and Grohl behind the drums and on vocals, the duo, as they tend to do with these covers, don’t reinvent the wheel here, instead delivering a relatively straightforward rendition of the song that’s close to how the original version sounds.
Ahead of “Jump,” the pair previously covered Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” (for which Grohl wore a dress), The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop,” and Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana.”
As for Foo Fighters, they recently announced a bunch of North American tour dates for 2022 but then had to cancel one of them almost immediately.
Watch Grohl and Kurstin perform “Jump” above.