She achieved sudden fame sometime last year, when videos of her electric drum covers of various rock songs started going viral on Twitter. Her performances were flawless, her energy was wild, and her precocity was obvious: Nandi Bushell is just 10 years old, but her talent makes that difficult to believe.
When she challenged Dave Grohl to outplay her own cover of “Everlong,” the drummer accepted, even though he hadn’t played the song in a decade. Since then, the pair has been locked in an ongoing friendly feud ― a percussive battle between two people who have somehow become both nemeses and mutual superfans.
And the battle just reached a fever pitch: Grohl, the former drummer for Nirvana and founder of the Foo Fighters, just debuted a brand new song — but it isn’t what you might expect. He decided to take this back-and-forth with Nandi to the next level, by improvising a fully-realized ode to the 10-year-old genius.
“OK, Nandi, you got me. You win round one,” he concedes in a video posted to the Foo Fighters’ Twitter account. “But I got something special for you, something you’ve never heard before. Something I’ve never heard before, because I’m about to write this off the top of my head, for you.”
Once he’s done his monologue, he immediately pitches into a rock song about a little girl who happens to be equal parts superhero and rockstar. The Grohlettes — Grohl’s daughters — offer some background vocals. Dave handles the drums and the guitars. He also takes up the lead singer role, which he uses to refer to Nandi as things like “hero wunderkind,” “coolest on the scene” and “number one supergirl.”
“She’s got the power! Got the soul! Gonna save the world with her rock and roll!” Grohl bellows, before hopping into an extended guitar moment.
The lyrics are true. Nandi is a kind of supergirl. How many 10-year-olds do you know who have performed with Lenny Kravitz and hung out with Questlove? This is kind of a full-circle moment for Nandi, when you consider where she was around this time last year.
“My dream is to one day jam with Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins and all the @FooFighters!” she wrote when she posted that cover of “Everlong,” in August 2019, which has over two million views.
A year later, one of her idols has performed a whole song about her.
Just a few hours after Grohl posted his video, Nandi posted her own adorable response, in which we can see her geek out over the occasion. “I can’t believe Mr. Grohl wrote a song about me!?! This is so so so EPIC!!” she wrote in a tweet attached to the video. “I think it’s the best song EVER, in the WORLD, EVER!!!”
Earlier this month, Nandi defeated Grohl in the first round of their battle, which saw both musicians do their own covers of Them Crooked Vultures’ song “Dead End Friends,” a dizzyingly fast song that Nandi played with ease. This next round might not be so simple, though. How will she top “the best song EVER, in the WORLD, EVER?”
Also on HuffPost: