In 2024, Dave Grohl made an unexpected public announcement: "I've recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside my marriage. I plan to be a loving and supporting 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." His band Foo Fighters canceled a headlining festival set, and he stayed out of the public eye until a surprise Nirvana reunion at an LA benefit a few months later. Now, Grohl is talking about it (or maybe talking around it) for the first time.
Foo Fighters are about to return with a new album and a stadium tour; they just shared the new single "Caught In The Echo" this morning. Now, Grohl is the subject of a new profile in The Guardian. In the story's lede, Grohl says that he's been going to intensive therapy since around the time he made that announcement: "I’ve been in therapy six days a week for 70 weeks. I did the math the other day: over 430 sessions."
In the profile, Grohl talks a lot about the things that he realized in therapy, but he doesn't confirm the impression that he started that work because of the child who he fathered outside his marriage: "There were so many things that led me to this therapy." When the writer Ben Beaumont-Thomas presses him further, Grohl offers this response:
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.
Grohl discusses his "addiction to achievement," his drive to work on lots and lots of projects: "And so I look back and I’m like, God, what was I trying to prove?" Beaumont-Thomas asks him if that's what led to cheating on his wife, and he says, "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."
In the Guardian piece, Grohl does not have more to say about the recent drummer swap, in which he fired Josh Freese and hired Nine Inch Nails drummer Ilan Rubin, only for Freese to take over the position in NIN. (He addressed it elsewhere last month.) But Foo Fighters bassist Nate Mendel does confirm that they didn't give Freese a reason for letting him go:
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.
You can read the full Guardian piece here.
