The hero cover was so gorgeous!
It’s so good. The message of the song is relevant… in the shared context of losing a bandmates too soon.
Dave Grohl in 2006 about this song (Dave was Nirvana’s drummer and bandmates with Kurt Cobain, who died of suicide in 1994):
Heroes are a funny thing. When I was young, I had Kiss posters, and I listened to Rush, and thought The Beatles were magicians. But the real heroes in my life were people that I was close to. Pete Stahl, who was the singer of Scream, was one. I was 17-years-old when we hit the road, and that guy showed me the ropes. So to me, he was a hero. And family members… my mom’s a saint. She raised two kids with no money, and we managed to be a happy family, so she seems like a hero to me. After Kurt died, the whole idea of hero worship or idolatry warped into something I thought was strange. You take a human being and you turn them into a deity. It’s really bizarre. I remember I was driving around Ireland when I was trying to get away from that whole fiasco after Kurt died. I was in the middle of nowhere, and it was beautiful. But then I was driving down a country road, and I saw a hitch hiker with a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on. So my perception of a hero kind of changed. If you listen to the lyrics to the song, it’s all about an ordinary hero. Just a regular person.
In the context of the songs he performed at Sirius XM: Lemonade, Lucky Again, My Hero, Palaces, Louis tells a story of appreciating the bittersweet aspects of life, the way it can turn from real to surreal in an instant because of the burdens of fame, and the fact that the most “real” thing is a sense of identity.