‘Threw our world upside down’: Dave Grohl opens up on Taylor Hawkins loss

Dave Grohl has spoken in an in-depth print interview for the first time about the death of his great mate Taylor Hawkins.

In a recent chat with Mojo, Grohl says the loss still doesn’t sit right with him four years on.

“Losing Taylor was never meant to be,” he said. “That threw our world upside down and made me question everything about life… It was so unfair. I still have a hard time making sense of it.”

Hawkins died on March 25, 2022, in Bogotá, Colombia, just hours before the band were due to play Festival Estéreo Picnic. Grohl recalls the immediate aftermath simply, the band gathered in his hotel room where they “drank and cried.”

In the days that followed, he kept himself busy to avoid sitting with it.

“I think I was afraid of silence, afraid of having to feel,” he admitted. “I never want to say music is a distraction, but I was definitely using it as a crutch for some broken limb.”

Sadly as we all know, it wasn’t the first time Grohl had to deal with the loss of a close bandmate, after losing Kurt Cobain in 1994. 

And just like back then, Grohl says, music became a way through it.

“We realized this was something we needed to do… because it had saved us once before.”

Instead of calling it quits, Foo Fighters pushed on, tribute shows, a new album But Here We Are, and a rotating cast behind the drum kit. Now, with Ilan Rubin on board and another album on the way, Grohl says his outlook has shifted.

"I've had to re-examine my ambition and intention," he said. 

"A lot of those projects over the years were surface validation to prove that I could do it, not that I needed to do it. I was always the guy who couldn't sit still. I couldn't take a vacation. I needed the TV on to put me to sleep. It was the silence - the still - that scared me.”

“My horizon is much different,” he continued. "There will be plenty of things that we'll do in the next few years that will remind everyone that Foo Fighters love to circle the planet playing rock shows."

And in a very topical way to describe things, Grohl said “Before, I was running on fumes… Now I’m just burning fucking diesel.”

It’s heavy stuff, but there’s something cathartic about hearing Grohl reflect on such a huge loss years on.