Dave Grohl reflected on fathering a child outside of his marriage and the death of Foo Fighters‘ drummer Taylor Hawkins in a new interview. Speaking to The Guardian, the musician described being in therapy “six days a week for 70 weeks,” totaling more than 430 sessions.
Grohl explained that he faced a series of challenges, including Hawkins’ death in 2022, his mother’s death four months later, and a public revelation of infidelity in 2024. Grohl said experiencing the two deaths in a row “was almost too much to feel.”
He added, “And so I did what I’ve always done, which was to just keep my boots on the ground and keep going. From the loss of Kurt [Cobain] to the loss of Taylor, I was afraid to sit and actually let those things into my heart.”
The musician started going to therapy for many reasons. “I have to be perfectly honest,” he said. “Writing songs and writing lyrics about these things is sometimes enough. As far as having a deeper, longer conversation about them, I still do reserve a lot of this for my own personal life, as impersonal and public as it may seem. But I think that for many reasons, I wound up in a place that I needed to stop and sit with myself and re-evaluate myself. It’s an ongoing process.”
The therapy began around the same time he announced he had fathered a child outside of his marriage in a statement on Instagram. “I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage,” he wrote. “I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her.”
Grohl told The Guardian that after releasing the statement he “had to turn everything off, one of those things being my concern for what other people think.” “Being able to shut off that part of yourself can be sometimes a very healthy exercise in considering life within your immediate radius,” he said. “Not giving all of that so much currency within yourself that it can completely destroy yourself.”
He added that at the time “I wasn’t sitting with myself and really letting [feelings] go from my head into my heart. Getting to the point where I was just like, ‘I need to stop, turn everything off and find my heart.’”
Grohl also spoke about his grief after losing Hawkins. “I fell asleep on a couch, like this one, in front of a television,” he recounted. “I thought that I’d woken up, and he was sitting right next to me. It was so fucking real. He was happy. His hair looked great; he was tan. The first thing I said was: ‘Oh my God, we miss you so much.’ He smiled. I said, ‘Where are you?’ And he smiled again and said: ‘Dude –’ And I woke up. I was like: Fuck, I almost had it!”
In the interview, Grohl declined to address the firing of drummer Josh Freese, who played with the Foo Fighters for a single tour. Freese said no reason was given for the termination. Bassist Nate Mendel said the choice was mutually beneficial.
“We made a decision that it was best for all parties,” Mendel told The Guardian. “To get into the personal details [with Freese], of why that didn’t necessarily sync up, just didn’t seem like it was going to benefit anybody. Some things are OK to be like: this is what’s best for us, and we’re going in a different direction.”
Last month, Grohl told Zane Lowe that moving on from Freese was in line with his history of performing with different drummers throughout his career. “Basically, we called Josh, and we were like, ‘Hey man, that was awesome. That was such a blast, thank you so much, but we’re going to move on and find another drummer,’” he said.
He added, “After that, we didn’t make a press release, tweet anything or do interviews. We didn’t say anything. Since then, there’s been a lot of talk about it, but I think Josh said it best when he was like, you know, he didn’t feel our music really resonated with him, and that’s really important, right?”
Foo Fighters are readying the release of their 12th album, Your Favorite Toy, which arrives April 24. The band shared a new song, “Caught in the Echo,” today.
