Dave Grohl's 430 therapy sessions and the myth of the nicest man in rock

In Graham Greene's 'The End of the Affair,' Bendrix writes that a story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. Dave Grohl's story could begin with Kurt Cobain's shotgun in 1994, or with Taylor Hawkins' heart giving out in a Bogotá hotel room in 2022, or with the Instagram confession of September 2024, when he told the world he had fathered a child outside his marriage. He has chosen to begin it from a therapist's couch.

He has attended 430 therapy sessions at a pace of six days a week for 70 weeks, he tells The Guardian in his first newspaper interview since the scandal broke. Even by American standards of self-examination, this is a staggering volume of talk.

The nicest man in rock

Grohl, 57, has spent three decades being described as genial, approachable, the 'nicest man in rock,' and his publicists now tell journalists he dislikes the label because it became a kind of prison: the nice man cannot cheat on his wife, father a secret child, or fire his drummer without explanation.

The Foo Fighters formed from trauma after Nirvana's drummer watched his friend and bandmate kill himself, and rather than sit with that, Grohl picked up a guitar and made a band, then another album, then another tour, keeping himself in motion for thirty years as a kind of anaesthesia.

There is such a thing as addiction to achievement, and it's dangerous. 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 fucking hours, and that feeling immediately goes away. And there's that hole again.

— Dave Grohl, The Guardian, March 2026

He documented his life relentlessly across HBO documentary series, memoir, horror-comedy film, new band projects, and endless touring. When an interviewer asks if this overextension led to the affair, he laughs grimly and says no, but admits it led to getting lost and never letting feelings go from his head into his heart.

2022: the year everything broke

Taylor Hawkins died in March 2022 at 50 with drugs in his system, and four months later Virginia Grohl, Dave's mother, whom he described as his best friend, his hero, his entire world, also died.

The grief album, But Here We Are, came in 2023 with Grohl doing all the drumming himself after the band tried playing to pre-recorded drum tracks and found it felt like performing alongside a ghost, a void they couldn't fill.

Pat Smear, rhythm guitarist, speaks of the dynamic lost: Hawkins and Grohl could be sweeter and shittier to each other than to regular friends, and Hawkins gave Grohl permission to be a proper frontman, to embrace arena rock without 90s indie guilt. When Foo Fighters did their first arena tour and someone questioned whether they should, Hawkins said to go for it, that they needed bigger lights.

Grohl describes a visitation dream where he fell asleep on a couch and thought he woke to find Hawkins sitting next to him, happy, tan, his hair looking great. His eyes fill with tears as he recounts asking Hawkins where he was, hearing Hawkins smile and say 'Dude,' and then waking up before learning the answer.

The confession and its aftermath

In September 2024, Grohl posted that he had become the father of a new baby daughter born outside his marriage and was doing everything he could to regain the trust of his wife Jordyn and their three daughters, offering no details and making no further statements.

Shortly after, the band fired drummer Josh Freese, who had stepped in for Hawkins after completing a single tour, and Freese said he was shocked and disappointed because no reason was given. The band still declines to explain, with bassist Nate Mendel saying only that it was best for all parties.

The therapy began around this time, though Grohl won't say the scandal drove him there, insisting there were so many things and reserving the details for his songs and personal life. When asked how it felt to post that confession and then face the world, he is more direct, saying he had to turn everything off, including his concern for what other people think.

The divided house

For twenty years, Grohl had a recurring dream in which he would walk into a house set on a hill and find a door leading to an entirely different space, one side warm and woodsy, the other modern and white and disconnected, and he would bring someone through the door to show them this division again and again.

Through therapy, he recognised the division within himself, that split between the public figure and whatever remained underneath, and once he understood it, the dream stopped coming.

The new Foo Fighters album, Your Favorite Toy, due 24 April, was made differently: no fancy studios, no A-list producer, just Grohl's small home studio with whatever amps were lying around and a return to punk-era speed. Guitarist Chris Shiflett describes it as rough, wobbly defiance, while Mendel says it sounds like their band again.

The last few records are a lot more produced, a lot more nipped and tucked. And this one was different. The band used whatever amps were on hand, whatever pedals, and had no option paralysis.

— Chris Shiflett, Foo Fighters lead guitarist

What remains

The band still operates as what one might call Grohl's benevolent dictatorship, with Grohl writing alone and making the final calls. When unhappy with the first drummer's work on a 1997 album, he secretly re-recorded the parts himself, something Smear still describes as leaving a bad taste. Grohl admits he sends smoke signals rather than memos, and if you've pushed him to the point where he gets mad, you've pushed him too far.

New drummer Ilan Rubin won his spot in auditions, playing like a hardcore drummer according to Grohl, and Smear watched Grohl's face during rehearsals and saw genuine happiness for the first time in a year.

Grohl declined to elaborate on the affair and will not discuss Freese's firing, describing only an ongoing process of re-evaluation, of finding his heart after decades of keeping feelings in his head, a man who built the nicest-guy-in-rock persona without ever quite knowing who was underneath it, and at 57 he is still trying to learn.

Foo Fighters' European tour begins this summer, including two nights at Liverpool's Anfield stadium, with Australian and New Zealand dates following in 2027. The ticket sales will be strong and the stadiums will fill, but whether Grohl has found whatever he was looking for in those 430 sessions remains his alone to know.