I am a new day rising
I’m a brand new sky
To hang the stars upon tonight
I am a little divided
Do I stay or run away
And leave it all behind?

- "Times Like These"

I recently had a chance to briefly meet a hero of mine. There is always trepidation about something like this. Sometimes you don't want your heroes to be real - afraid perhaps that pulling them from the poster on your wall, to a real live person might shatter the mythology.

The other thing you don't want to be is a pest. A celebrity's life can be a grueling one, and everyone wants a piece of you. I've discovered this more recently through a friend of mine, a senior marketer for a big music label in New York. As a lover of music, I find the behind-the-scenes stuff she tells me fascinating. Especially when she's talking about artists that I listen to.

There goes my hero
Watch him as he goes
There goes my hero
He's ordinary

- "My Hero"

The hero status of Dave Grohl (pictured) started when he was the drummer in Nirvana, the Seattle "slacker" band I first discovered at 18, and whose album Nevermind persuaded me that rock could be raw and immediate, rather than the bleach-blonde meathead music I had been used to until then.

Grohl was a linchpin to the Nirvana sound, and in the space of just two albums he became a member of the biggest rock band in the world - only to have that band destroyed by the suicide of its singer, Kurt Cobain. Initially, for many fans of Cobain and Nirvana, Grohl's new band, the Foo Fighters, seemed at first a poor imitation of Nirvana. At least that's how it seemed to me.

I was finally got turned on to the Foo Fighters' music by accident in 2002, when the music label friend visited from New York, bringing a stack of CDs of her artists for us, including the new Foo album, One By One.

In the wake of 9-11, just as U2's "Beautiful Day" had done, the Foo Fighters song "Times Like These" soon hit a chord with me and many other people, for the bittersweet optimism inherent in its lyrics. I read somewhere that Lance Armstrong used the song for inspiration during his road cycling training.

"Its times like these you learn to live again
Times like these, time and time again..

For someone who had witnessed the highs and lows of life, Grohl seemed well qualified for the role of the angry yet defiant survivor, and his reflections on tragedy seemed heart felt. As a listener, I began to take more notice.

The next time the Foo Fighters came into the frame was on a big day for me, the day I asked someone to marry me. I suppose for anyone who lives through this somewhat harrowing experience, this is always going to be a momentous day. Assuming of course you end up with a yes. I vividly recall a lot of the details of that day. The New York weather, the books I purchased, and one I looked at for a moment (Catcher in the Rye), and a poster that I got that day from my friend, of the Foo Fighters.

It was a tour poster, written in Spanish - which in rock tour poster terms made it all the more cool. Strangely enough, that day I also bought a book by the other surviving member of Nirvana.

So here I was in Singapore in June this year, dragging my well-traveled poster along to an Album Preview Event, which promised an audience with two of the Foo Fighters, including Dave Grohl. Of course it was packed - and they came out late. Such is the privilege of fame.

Amidst the free drinks, introductions to the album, and the chance to hear "Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace" in full, there was a brief unplanned window at the end - a few minutes where the two rock stars "mingled" with the 50-odd people gathered. What it ended up being was a bit of a chaotic mess. But it was my chance.

It was clear that Dave and Foo guitarist Nate weren't going to be mingling too long - fresh (maybe fresh isn't the word) from finishing the album, they had flown that day from Tokyo. It was now late in the day, and the lads were showing signs of wear and tear. Sporting a black jersey, a full beard and swollen-looking face, Grohl looked a little like French rugby giant Chagal might after a night staying up eating pizza. Yet there was something liberatingly non-airbrushed about him. Still grunge after all these years.

So I bustled in true reporter style to the front of the scrum, knowing that at best, I'd have one sentence with each of them. Rather than the throw-away lines "what was Kurt really like?" or "you guys are great, can I get a photo", I thought I'd use my poster story angle.

"Dave, would you sign my poster for me? I got it on the day my wife and I got engaged."

Truly corny indeed, but I figured it was the sort of thing that I'd be happy to entertain, if I were famous. Something with a dose of real in it. True enough, both of them were very obliging and humble, wishing the two of us congratulations in the process. And still today, my poster duly reads, "Good luck, Dave Grohl," along with a similar epithet from Nate. The rest of the words are still in Spanish.

In a recent interview I heard on Radio One, Dave (I somewhat rashly figure that we're on first-name basis now) got pretty choked up when speaking about a song on his new album, the final track called "Home". He said the song had offered him a rare chance to focus less on the fun-and-fury of the rockstar lifestyle, and more on his new family. And you could hear his voice catch even as he talked about it.

People I've loved, I have no regrets
Some I remember some I forget
Some of them living some of them dead
And all I want is to be home.

- "Home"

From a very brief encounter and a music collection which now numbers all of their albums, I'm increasingly impressed by the Foo Fighters, essentially because despite their rock royalty status they've also maintained their uncompromising normalness, their passion for living a life that appears mostly to be pretty similar to ours, and their determination not to dwell on things, but instead pick it all up, face forwards - and rock on.