‘Validation was an insatiable monster’: Dave Grohl on Foo Fighters’ punk-rock return – and life after his infidelity | Foo Fighters

‘I’m just going to recline.” Weighing up the seating options in a luxury London hotel suite, Dave Grohl opts for the sofa. He lays his head and swings his legs round until his black leather boots are resting on the upholstery, and clasps his hands across his stomach. Punk-rock disregard for shoe etiquette aside, it’s the classic pose of the psychoanalysed. “I’ve been in therapy six days a week for 70 weeks,” he says. “I did the maths the other day: over 430 sessions.”

Even by US standards, that is a lot – but if anyone needed to work out who they are and why they were doing what they were doing, it was Grohl. Nirvana ended traumatically after the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994, but their drummer Grohl quickly formed a new band, Foo Fighters, stepping up to frontman and turning them into the definitive stadium rockers of the new century with hits such as Everlong, Best of You and The Pretender. Grohl was often described as “the nicest man in rock”, a label his team tells me he dislikes, but he was certainly genial and seemed to be settling into middle age with hobbyist projects – documentary series, memoir, horror-comedy film – between a series of world tours and middle-ranking Foo Fighters albums. He had married second wife Jordyn Blum in 2003 and they’d had three daughters together. Bassist Nate Mendel tells me: “When we were first rehearsing in the mid-90s, Dave said: I just want this band to be low-drama, and for it to be fun.”

But in March 2022, Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins died in a Bogotá hotel room, with drugs in his system. Grohl’s mother, Virginia – “my best friend, my hero, my entire world”, he says – died four months later. The grief informed Grohl’s richest songwriting in years on the 2023 album But Here We Are. Then, in September 2024, he had a confession to make, which seriously dented that nice-guy reputation: “I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside my marriage,” he posted online. “I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her. I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.” And then Josh Freese, who had taken over as drummer, was fired after a single tour: Freese said he wasn’t given a reason and was “shocked and disappointed”.

Musically, Grohl has reacted to all this upheaval by going back to his beginnings. His first public performance since the infidelity scandal was on drums for a benefit gig with the reformed Nirvana, with the likes of Kim Gordon and Grohl’s eldest daughter Violet, 19, performing lead vocals. Now, Foo Fighters are reaching even further back, to the hardcore punk bands like Scream that Grohl started out with in the 1980s. Unlike the last few Foos albums, which were done in flashy studios with A-list producer Greg Kurstin, their forthcoming 12th album Your Favorite Toy was recorded quickly at Grohl’s small home studio without a producer. It is often fast, loud and angry.

‘The last few records are a lot more produced, a lot more nipped and tucked,” says the band’s surf-dude lead guitarist Chris Shiflett, sat alongside the bespectacled and bookish Mendel on the same sofa when I speak to them separately from Grohl. “And this one was not at all. It was great – we used whatever amps were on hand, whatever pedals, and didn’t have option paralysis.”

Mendel agrees. “And honestly the last handful of years have been a difficult period for us,” he adds, “getting punched in the face a couple of times. So there’s this rough wobbly defiance to the new album, that, to me, sounds like our band.”

It began with Grohl writing alone, in all sorts of styles, recalling everything from Massive Attack, Pink Floyd, Bad Brains and the Knack to “an eight-minute Led Zeppelin opus,” he says. “The aha! moment came when I was up one night listening to all 30 or 40 of the ideas. I hit this spot in the sequence that was eight or nine of the up-tempo bangers all in a row. I thought, OK, this is the record.”

Foo Fighters seem to operate less like a democracy and more like Grohl’s benevolent dictatorship. Mendel and Shiflett each make their own music outside Foo Fighters and are happy with this setup. “It produces great songs,” Mendel says. “Then I’ll go and make a weird-ass record that no one listens to, and I’m satisfied.” But Grohl has “some passive-aggressive ways of communicating things”, Mendel says. When Grohl wasn’t happy with first drummer William Goldsmith’s work on 1997 album The Colour and the Shape, he re-recorded the drums himself without telling Goldsmith, who then quit.

“I didn’t like that,” says rhythm guitarist Pat Smear, who I speak to on the phone later: he missed the London trip after breaking his leg while gardening. “Dave was just learning to be a bandleader; we could have handled the whole thing better. It left a bad taste.”

In 2002, Grohl went to drum for Queens of the Stone Age. He then returned to Foo Fighters but said he was unhappy with the band’s direction. They had “a big blow out”, says Mendel, patched things up, made the double-Grammy-winning album One by One, “and after that, I think he got a little bit more comfortable with being assertive”.

“I’m not the greatest communicator,” Grohl admits. “I might be able to hold a conversation but maybe not often able to say the thing that I really want to say. It’s easier in song.” Through therapy, he says he’s learned to be more communicative. “Not only with others, but with myself.”

But even now, says Shiflett, “you have to spend enough time around him to read between the lines”.

“He sends smoke signals, not memos,” says Mendel.

“Exactly,” continues Shiflett. “If you’ve pushed him to the point he gets mad about something, you’ve pushed him too far.” When have you pissed him off? “How much time you got? Let’s not get into all that! But the classic Dave line, where you have to know him to understand what he means, is: ‘That could be cool?’ That means: no, we’re never doing that.”

All the Foos say the band is better for having new drummer Ilan Rubin, who won out in auditions. “He has a real deep knowledge of classic rock, but he plays like a hardcore drummer,” Grohl says.

“As soon as we got Ilan, I was looking at Dave and thinking: wow, this is the first time I’ve seen him genuinely happy in a year,” Smear says.

I’m told prior to the interview that Grohl won’t talk about the firing of Rubin’s predecessor Freese, so I ask his bandmates: is it true that Freese wasn’t given a reason? “Yeah,” says Mendel. “We made a decision that it was best for all parties. 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.”

Mendel does at least credit Freese with “coming into a situation and doing exactly what needs to be done musically to make it work” – helping the band back on to the road after the devastating loss of Hawkins.

In the months after Hawkins’ death, the band “would get together almost every week,” says Mendel, “with the Hawkins family, people who work with us, and just have meals and drink and talk and laugh and cry, together.” When rehearsing the tribute concerts to him in autumn 2022, Shiflett says he “would find myself getting lost playing songs I’d played thousands of times”. A little fill or note that Hawkins would usually add “would not be there, and I’d be adrift”.

Foo Fighters recorded But Here We Are before they hired Freese: Grohl did all the drumming. He did almost no interviews around that album because he was grieving so deeply. Initially, the band tried playing along with drums Grohl had separately recorded, “just speakers with drums coming out of them”, he says now. “And it was almost more traumatic. Like a ghost. Nothing felt natural. There was just this void that we couldn’t fill. But we tried.”

“It was weird Taylor wasn’t there; super weird that he was there,” Smear says of those sessions: Hawkins was “manifested in his absence”. Smear missed “the dynamic that he and Dave had together, when you can be sweeter and shittier to your best friend than you can be to your regular friends. And the push-pull over drum parts.”

Mendel says Hawkins is “part of the band still … and he made an imprint early on that still sticks with how we are as a band. A conversation that went something like: hey, what if we don’t suck any more?”

Shiflett explains. “It was his idea: ‘We have to be a tight unit so Dave can be the guy out front, and we’re the ones holding it down.’ Taylor made Dave feel OK about being a frontman leading the show. Even when I joined the band [in 1999], there was still that residue of 90s indie-rock guilt about success. Like when we did our first arena tour: should we be doing this? Taylor was like: ‘Fuck yeah we should! We need bigger lights. We’re playing London? Let’s get Brian May to play a song with us. Let’s embrace that classic rock thing.’”

After Hawkins’ death, Grohl says he was visited by his friend and bandmate. “I have had these dreams that seem like visitations,” he says. “Whether it’s from my mother, or my old friend Jimmy, or Kurt, or my father. And in the dreams, I know that I’m dreaming, but those people are here. And it’s as if they’ve never left.”

On this occasion, “I fell asleep on a couch, like this one, in front of a television. I thought that I’d woken up, and he was sitting right next to me.” Grohl’s eyes fill with tears and his voice turns ragged. “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!”

For Grohl, the death of Hawkins and then his mother “was almost too much to feel. 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 to the loss of Taylor, I was afraid to sit and actually let those things into my heart.” His mother’s death was different: “I was with her every day leading up to when she passed. I was with her when she passed. And she never lost her spirit, her light.” His voice is now deep and grave. “But … her body was … going. And so that … I let into my heart. Rather than just kind of keeping it up in my head and continuing on.”

This moment, along with the hundreds of hours of therapy, gave Grohl a new existential perspective. He characterises himself as someone who was once “pulled in different directions emotionally without having this anchor, this centred feeling”.

Without understanding it, that feeling had made itself known in another of his dreams, this one recurring for 20 years. “I walked into a house, set on a hill in the countryside. There was this door that would lead to an entirely different house: modern, very white, completely different than the other side which is very warm and woodsy. In every dream there was someone with me and I’d say, Oh my God, you have to check this out. I would open this little door and bring someone into this other space.” Since the therapy, and making the realisation that “there was this disconnection or division within myself, I don’t have that dream any more. And so a lot of the new album has to do with exactly that.”

I trace back his 70-week therapy timeline, which must have started shortly after the admission of infidelity: was that what prompted him to go? He waves the question away: “There were so many things that led me to this therapy.” Later, I press him further about the scandal, and he cuts me off. “I have to be perfectly honest. 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.”

How did it feel to go on social media and make that public admission about his affair? “I 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. Not giving all of that so much currency within yourself that it can completely destroy yourself.”

There have been other self-discoveries. “There were years where I was so overly ambitious with things, like a documentary series on HBO, writing a book, whatever. I think having grown up in suburban Virginia with a public-school teacher as a mother, any opportunity you got, you would take. But over time, you spread yourself so thin. And so I look back and I’m like, God, what was I trying to prove? There is such a thing as addiction to achievement, and it’s dangerous. You’ll set a goal for yourself and you put everything you have into it; the world disappears. Then you achieve that finish line, and it feels good for 24 fucking hours, and that feeling immediately goes away. And there’s that hole again, there’s that emptiness, and you’re like, shit, I need to fill it up with something else.”

Is that how he ended up cheating on his wife? Grohl laughs, grimly. “No. I think that’s how I ended up overextending myself and getting lost. 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.”

Mendel says he has noticed a change in Grohl since the infidelity revelation. “He’s putting the aspirations for the band in a different place, ambition-wise. There’s other things that have more prominence: life outside of music.”

When the news broke, the band went on pause and cancelled a tour. Did they worry Foo Fighters could be seriously damaged by the revelations? “Of course,” says Mendel. “Tempered by the fact that it was the third time in five years we’d had an entire tour booked and it went away” – after the pandemic and Hawkins’ death – “so as crazy as it was, it was kind of: we’ll figure it out.”

“We just all wanted to run and give him a big hug,” Smear says, and “let him know, both of them” – Grohl’s wife included – “that we are here.”

“When Dave called me that morning,” Shiflett says, “I just thought: take all the time you need. And then my house burned down a few months after that,” in the Los Angeles wildfires. “So having an extensive break wound up being necessary for me.”

Meanwhile, Grohl spent time at home. One song from the new album, Window, came from bonding with Harper, the second of his now four daughters. “Her two heroes are Kim Gordon and Kim Deal,” Grohl says. “And she’s a bass player. And so I wrote this song that to me almost seemed like a Breeders song off of [the band’s debut] Pod, and I said, hey, do you want to record a song together?” Grohl sings: “You were a window cleaner, letting in the sun.” It turns out this really was inspired by a window cleaner 30 storeys up in a tower block, “seeing the lives of others while never being seen by the person within the room … they’re helping brighten your life, your day.” It feels suffused with the kindness and forgiveness of the people around him.

Grohl said in his public statement that he hoped to win back the trust of his wife and family. Has he done that? He redirects me again to the lyrics. “I think they speak volumes. Maybe more than I can speak right now.” He picks out single Your Favorite Toy, “basically one side of yourself screaming at the other: I’m almost taunting myself for all of those things that needed to be examined.” Can you articulate what those things are? “No.” He gives me a mirthless smile, teeth clamped.

He’s more forthcoming about the brilliant hardcore punk rager Of All People, which begins: “Of all people, you survived / When no one else could stay alive / You know you should be dead / But you’re alive instead.” He wrote it “after bumping into a drug dealer from the 90s that was getting everyone fucked up on heroin. I hadn’t seen them in 30 years, and they’re alive, healthy and sober. I was so happy that this person survived, while at the same time, I was devastated, because of all of the people I know that we’ve lost to exactly that drug” – Cobain was a heroin user. “I was so fucking angry, but at the same time so grateful to see them alive and well. Again, a conversation within myself, feeling so conflicted and divided. When I read the lyrics back, I mentioned them to my therapist: is this survivor’s guilt?”

Child Actor, meanwhile, is a head-on confrontation with his need for validation. “It’s like this hungry ghost, an insatiable monster that you do your best to fill. But if you finally sit with yourself and consider humility and gratitude and empathy … you can strip away all the other bullshit and find those few things that are most important. But that takes turning off the world and stopping and sitting in silence with yourself.”

“The grass is never greener / Time ain’t no redeemer,” he yells on Spit Shine, trying to get his shit together and reckon with a healthier form of ambition. “Not just ambition in a career sense but ambition in life. I know what I’ve been doing, but what’s the horizon? Where’s the North Star that I’m following to get to this place? And how long do I have to do it?”

A corny bumper sticker Grohl saw in LA traffic has stayed with him. “It said something to the effect of: ‘Be kind to others because everyone is going through something that you don’t realise.’ I consider that with every single person that I know. And I think that it’s important to realise that about yourself and do the best you can to work on it, to get to a place where you feel whole.” He rolls his eyes. “I don’t want to sound like I’ve been in therapy for 70 weeks, but it’s hard not to. I’m lying on a couch.”