Andy Greene
View all posts by Andy Greene March 18, 2026
Dave Grohl performing at Coachella 2025 Scott Dudelson/Getty Images for Coachella Over the past four years, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has said very little about the emotional toll the death of Taylor Hawkins took on the band. But in a new interview with Mojo, Grohl is opening up.
“Losing Taylor was never meant to be,” Grohl told writer David Fricke. “That threw our world upside down and made me question everything about life, that it was so … It was so unfair. I still have a hard time making sense of it.”
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Grohl poured himself into his work. “I think I was afraid of silence, afraid of having to feel,” he said. “I could have used a bit more of the silence, a bit more of digging deeper. I never want to say music is a distraction, but I was definitely using it as a crutch for some broken limb.”
The Foo Fighters returned from hiatus in May 2023 with Josh Freese behind the kit. But they parted ways with him two years later, replacing him with Nine Inch Nails drummer Ilan Rubin. (In a move with almost no precedent in rock history, NIN replaced Rubin with Freese.) “Looking back, it was probably more an issue with their management,” Freese told The New York Times in 2025. “It wasn’t music that I really resonated with.”
Grohl has yet to articulate exactly why they let Freese go. “We didn’t make a press release, tweet anything, or do interviews,” he told Zane Lowe in February. “We didn’t say anything. Since then, there’s been a lot of talk about it, but I think Josh said it best when he was like, you know, he didn’t feel our music really resonated with him, and that’s really important, right?”
