Dave Grohl has been through a lot in the last four years. Taylor Hawkins died onstage in Bogota in March 2022. His mother followed four months later. Then in 2024, he publicly announced he had fathered a child outside his marriage. And through all of it – through the loss, the grief, the public unraveling – he kept working. Kept touring. Kept going.
In a new interview with The Guardian, Grohl finally talks about what it actually cost him to operate that way. The headline number is almost absurd: therapy six days a week for 70 weeks, totaling more than 430 sessions. That is not a man casually exploring his feelings. That is a man trying to excavate himself from underneath decades of armor.
The armor has always been the work. Grohl has talked about this pattern before – the way writing songs, performing, staying busy served as emotional processing. But he admits now that it only went so far. “From the loss of Kurt to the loss of Taylor, I was afraid to sit and actually let those things into my heart,” he told The Guardian. That is a striking thing to say, coming from someone whose public persona is relentless optimism and kinetic energy. The guy who crowd-surfed in a throne. The guy who performs with a broken leg. The guy who turns every moment into joy. What was he not letting himself feel?
The infidelity revelation changed that calculus. Grohl says that after releasing his Instagram statement – spare, dignified, offering nothing beyond the bare minimum – he had to “turn everything off, one of those things being my concern for what other people think.” That sounds like a relief as much as a reckoning. The relentless audience-facing version of Dave Grohl – the guy who is perpetually grateful, perpetually game – had to go quiet for a while.
What comes through in the interview is not exactly closure. He still will not talk about the Josh Freese situation, the drummer who played a single tour with the Foo Fighters and was let go without explanation. Bassist Nate Mendel said only that “this is what is best for us.” Grohl did not address it at all. Some things are still sealed off.
But the Taylor Hawkins story he tells is genuinely affecting. He fell asleep on a couch, woke up to a dream where Hawkins was sitting next to him, tan and happy, and when Grohl said “we miss you so much,” Hawkins smiled. Grohl asked where he was. Hawkins said “Dude -” and then Grohl woke up. “Fuck, I almost had it,” he says. It is hard to read that and not feel something.
The Foo Fighters still exist. They are still making music. And Grohl sounds, for the first time in a long time, like someone who has started to locate the difference between processing pain through art and actually processing pain. That is not a small distinction. For a lot of musicians who have built their whole identity on forward motion and output, it can take a decade – or more – to learn it.
430 sessions is a long time in a room with yourself. Something apparently shifted.
