Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett presents Dead Peasants at DC9

The latest round of rumors started, perhaps, because Chris Shiflett has formed an active side project that’s straight-up country. But Chris Shiflett & the Dead Peasants is a passion, but certainly not a replacement for the Foo Fighters.

“I’m in the Foo Fighters and proud of that,” Shiflett said. “I’m lucky I’ve been able to be in that band last 11 years. … We have been on a long hiatus, and people always think we are right on the verge of breaking up. We are actually just about to make a new record.”

But that comes after the tour to support the Dead Peasants’ self-titled album, which Shiflett calls “straight-up country. It’s got that influence.”

Perhaps that’s not surprising when you consider Shiflett cut his musical teeth — as far as fandom, anyway — with traditional country and moved on to enjoy the alt-country and Americana formats that have been prevalent in recent years.

Country and Americana are so prevalent, in fact, that Shiflett’s major challenge with this tour was finding a steel pedal player to go on tour with him. Although he and Dead Peasants did acoustic tours without one, the lack of steel made him feel as if something was missing from the sound.

But don’t think just because Shiflett can appreciate country that that’s the only influence brought to the Dead Peasants. “Everything’s an influence,” he said. “When we were making this [Dead Peasants] record, we were listening to a lot of Rolling Stones. My earliest memories are of my oldest brothers playing Stones records, and then in high school I got into punk rock, rockabilly, and bands like the Replacements.”

Now that he’s a rock musician in one of the most popular contemporary bands, he’s used to recording songs with plenty of layers. He learned to scale that back for the Dead Peasants albums.

“We tend to make rock records … [where] you can’t hear the songs from the guitar tracks,” he said. “These songs are kind of sparse with lots of instrumentation and very rich.”