It’s been more than 550 days since Foo Fighters singer/guitarist Dave Grohl made the public admission that he’d fathered a child outside of his marriage to wife Jordyn Blum. At the time, Grohl wrote on Instagram, “I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage. I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her.”
The father of three daughters added, “I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.”
Until this week, Grohl had not publicly discussed the fallout from his infidelity, but in a new, candid interview with The Guardian, the 57-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer addressed the issue for the first time, revealing that he’s been going to therapy “six days a week for 70 weeks,” adding up to more than 430 session to date.
When the interviewer did the math and suggested that the timeline suggested he started therapy shortly after his mea culpa, Grohl said, “there were so many things that led me to this therapy” in an interview in which he also discussed his deep well of sorrow over the deaths of his beloved mother, Virginia Grohl, who died in August 2022, as well as late Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died in March of that year at age 50 while on tour in South America.
When pressed to discuss the scandal further, Grohl said, “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 said after posting the admission of the affair online he had to “turn everything off” out of his concern for “what other people think,” calling that kind of public pull-back 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.”
Ambitious by nature and perennially juggling multiple projects, Grohl looked back at the years when he was “overly ambitious,” cranking out an HBO series (Sonic Highways) and writing books (The Storyteller) while recording albums and touring, now wondering what he was trying to prove by keeping his schedule so hectic.
“There is such a thing as addiction to achievement, and it’s dangerous,” he said. “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 f–king hours, and that feeling immediately goes away. And there’s that hole again, there’s that emptiness, and you’re like, s–t, I need to fill it up with something else.”
Asked if that endless need to keep busy and fill the hole led to his infidelity, Grohl is described as “grimly” laughing and saying, “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.”
Since that time, bandmate bassist Nate Mendel said he’s seen a change in Grohl, describing the Foos founder as putting his aspirations for the band “in a different place, ambition-wise. There’s other things that have more prominence: life outside music.”
The band took a break and canceled a planned tour after the news broke, with Mendel admitting that there were concerns it would damage the group, who had previously canceled two other tours in that five-year span, one due to the pandemic and the other following Hawkins’ death. “We just all wanted to run and give him a big hug,” said guitarist Pat Smear. “[And] let him know, both of them” – Grohl and Blum – “that we are here.”
Asked if his public statement helped him win back the trust of his wife and family, Grohl pointed to the lyrics from the band’s recent single, the raging “Your Favorite Toy,” saying “I think they speak volumes. Maybe more than I can speak right now.” He said the song is akin to “one side of yourself screaming at the other: I’m almost taunting myself for all of those things that needed to be examined.”
Grohl also touched on how since Hawkins’ death he has been visited by his charismatic friend and late bandmate in vivid dreams. “I have had these dreams that seem like visitations,” he said. “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.”
In one of those dreams, Grohl said he fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV and he thought he’d woken up to find Hawkins sitting right next to him. His eyes welling with tears, Grohl added, “It was so f–king 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: ‘f–k, I almost had it!’”
The Foo Fighters’ 12th studio album, Your Favorite Toy, is due out on April 24. The band’s very intimate show at St. James Church in Dingle, Ireland — which they played last month in front of 80 fans — will be streamed worldwide on April 6, airing at 4:30 p.m. ET on the RTÉ Player.
