debut album, but by constant questions about the enigma that was Kurt Cobain.

So, with Foo Fighters' new album The Color And The Shape, Grohl figured it was high time to get a few things off his chest about the sad end of his former band.

Catch is, it's not in the pat, tell-all way one might expect.

"It's a lot easier to bare your feelings in lyrics than it is to spend hours and hours shrouding the true meaning of the song in mystery," says the affable 28-year-old, in town yesterday for a show at the Warehouse. Foo Fighters appear live on MuchMusic's Intimate & Interactive tonight.

"With the first album, I realized there were a lot of questions people wanted answers to, and they thought that this would be the scoop. So I spent a lot of time masking things. Then I spent the next year and a half fending off these insane misinterpretations of the words. It was a drag."

Did the odd interpretation ever hit the mark?

"Sometimes," says Grohl with a chuckle. "But I'd tell them that they were wrong anyway."

Grohl has a reputation for being pleasant and approachable -- the non-star type you want to hang out with. He is. He is also guarded when discussing private issues. The son of a Washington, D.C. journalist, he understands the media game and knows how to dodge a question.

While he maintains that The Color And The Shape reveals his feelings on the past, it's more of an emotional exorcism than a fountain of gossip.

"With this album I put a lot of pressure on myself to spell it out for everyone," he says. "There were words I took out of my journal that I was afraid to let go. But the songs had this emotional feel and the only way for the lyrics to live up to them was to match it."

Still, Grohl is indirect when asked if the song My Hero is, as rumored, about Cobain.

"My Hero is a song about having heroes that are ordinary people," he says. "When I was young I didn't have sports heroes, I didn't have rock heroes. My heroes were friends of the family, people I knew. I still know most of my heroes. That song is about having respect for the ordinary person instead of the star."

In other words: Read between the lines. Grohl is leaving it up to the listener to figure out how.

He's more up-front about the many Foo-related rumors that filter through the Internet -- which he calls "The world's largest bathroom wall."

He dismisses rumors that there is tension between him and Foo guitarist Pat Smear over creative control. He laughs at the mention of rumors that he is a band dictator. According to him, Foo Fighters had to hire producer Gil Norton to act as a decision- maker and "ass-kicker."

And Grohl's downright proud of the big rock sound featured on The Color And The Shape.

"We really wanted to go in and just make this pop-rock record," he says. "These days everyone is going back to their punk roots: 'This is what we really sound like.'

"We figured, 'F--- it. Let's get a producer and go in and make something that sounds like FM radio rock.' I love Boston and Styx as much as I love Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys.

"People are so puzzled over why I made this rock record when rock is so ... over. Well, I did it because I'd never done it before." <