LOS ANGELES – Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl revealed he underwent more than 430 hours of therapy – roughly six days a week for 70 weeks – as he navigated a period of profound personal loss and public scrutiny. The intensive therapy began as he grappled with the death of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins in 2022, followed by the death of his mother four months later, and the subsequent public disclosure of a child born outside of his marriage in 2024, according to a modern interview with The Guardian.
Grohl described the back-to-back losses of Hawkins and his mother as “almost too much to feel,” leading him to rely on familiar coping mechanisms. “And so I did what I’ve always done, which was to just keep my boots on the ground and keep going,” he said. He acknowledged a pattern of avoiding deep emotional processing, tracing it back to the loss of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994. “From the loss of Kurt to the loss of Taylor, I was afraid to sit and actually let those things into my heart.”
The decision to enter therapy, Grohl explained, stemmed from a need for deeper self-reflection. “I have to be perfectly honest,” he said. “Writing songs and writing lyrics about these things is sometimes enough. 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 timing coincided with his public acknowledgement of fathering a daughter outside of his marriage, a revelation he made via an Instagram post.
Following the announcement, Grohl said he deliberately shielded himself from external judgment. “I had to turn everything off, one of those things being my concern for what other people think,” he told The Guardian. He found value in focusing on his immediate surroundings, “Not giving all of that so much currency within yourself that it can completely destroy yourself.” He described a period of emotional detachment, stating he wasn’t “sitting with myself and really letting [feelings] go from my head into my heart.”
Grohl also recounted a vivid dream in which he encountered Hawkins, a moment he described as profoundly real. “I fell asleep on a couch…I thought that I’d woken up, and he was sitting right next to me,” he said. “He was happy…The first thing I said was: ‘Oh my God, we miss you so much.’ He smiled…I was like: Fuck, I almost had it!” Ultimate Classic Rock reported on the emotional weight of this experience for Grohl.
The interview also touched on the recent departure of drummer Josh Freese, who joined the Foo Fighters for a single tour. Grohl declined to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding Freese’s exit, but bassist Nate Mendel stated that the decision was mutually beneficial. “We made a decision that it was best for all parties,” Mendel said, adding that delving into the specifics “just didn’t seem like it was going to benefit anybody.” Grohl previously indicated that the move aligned with the band’s history of rotating drummers, as reported by Mojo Magazine.
The Foo Fighters are preparing to release their twelfth studio album, Your Favorite Toy, on April 24, and have already shared the new single “Caught in the Echo.”
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