Dave Grohl on the Dream Visit From Late Bandmate That Changed Everything
For his first newspaper interview since admitting to infidelity, Dave Grohl chose the recliner. The Foo Fighters frontman stretched out and laid back. It was the same position he had been in when his late friend and Foo drummer, Taylor Hawkins, visited him in a dream.
“I fell asleep on a couch, like this one, in front of a television,” Grohl told The Guardian. “I thought that I’d woken up, and he was sitting right next to me.” His eyes filled with tears. “It was so fucking real.”
Hawkins died in a Bogotá hotel room in March 2022. Four months later, Grohl’s mother Virginia, who he calls his best friend, hero, and entire world, also died. The rapid losses forced Grohl to confront something he had been outrunning since Kurt Cobain’s death 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,” he said. “I did what I’ve always done, which was to just keep my boots on the ground and keep going.”
This time, keeping his boots on the ground was not enough. Grohl started therapy 70 weeks ago, six days a week, totaling more than 430 sessions. He now describes his former self as someone “pulled in different directions emotionally without having this anchor, this centred feeling.” A recurring dream of a divided house that haunted him for 20 years has stopped.
“I walked into a house, set on a hill in the countryside,” he said. “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.” After therapy he realized “there was this disconnection or division within myself. I don’t have that dream any more.”
Grief shaped the music, too. The 2023 album But Here We Are was written in the aftermath of both deaths. The upcoming Foo Fighters record, Your Favorite Toy, was recorded quickly at Grohl’s home studio without a producer. Bassist Nate Mendel calls it “rough wobbly defiance” after “getting punched in the face a couple of times.”
When asked directly about the affair that became public in September 2024, Grohl declined to elaborate. “I still do reserve a lot of this for my own personal life, as impersonal and public as it may seem,” he said. “I wound up in a place that I needed to stop and sit with myself and re‑evaluate myself. It’s an ongoing process.”
He has had other “visitations” since Hawkins appeared to him. “Whether it’s from my mother, or my old friend Jimmy [Swanson], or Kurt, or my father,” Grohl said. “In the dreams, I know that I’m dreaming, but those people are here. And it’s as if they’ve never left.”
What Grohl wants to leave people with is a cheesy bumper sticker he saw in LA. “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.” He jokes that he doesn’t want to sound like he’s been in therapy for 70 weeks, “but it’s hard not to. I’m lying on a couch.”
Your Favorite Toy drops on April 24.
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