If you’re a big Foo Fighters fan, then you and Scott Ian have something in common.

As the Anthrax guitarist tells ABC Audio, he’s been following the Foos since their 1995 debut album. He recalls seeing them at a radio festival when Dave Grohl introduced a new song from their then-upcoming album The Colour and the Shape.

“Usually, it’s, like, that cliche, ‘Ah, they’re playing a new one, whatever,'” Ian remembers thinking. That attitude, however, quickly shifted when the performance began. The name of that song? “Everlong.”

“That song hit me so hard,” Ian says. “That f***ing chorus, it hit me so hard the first time I ever heard it.”

“It was just undeniably fantastic,” he adds. “It just moved me.”

“Everlong” is now, of course, one of the Foo Fighters’ signature songs — if not the signature song. But at the time, the group was still growing out of the shadow of Grohl’s last band, Nirvana. Still, Ian says he knew the Foos were destined for great things, which is exactly what he told Grohl when he met him a year later.

“I was, like, ‘Oh my god, they’re gonna be the biggest band in the world,'” Ian shares. “‘That’s the best rock song I’ve ever heard.'”

To bring everything full circle, Ian’s son Revel joined Foo Fighters onstage during a 2019 festival set to play guitar on “Everlong.”

“When that got to happen and he got to go up and play guitar … I can’t talk about it without crying,” Ian says.

Ian recently shared his love for the Foos with a covers medley performed alongside Revel, now 11, which he posted in April in honor of the late Taylor Hawkins.

Anthrax, meanwhile, will release a new live album and concert film, XL, on July 15.

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