“I was afraid of silence, afraid of having to feel.” Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl reflects on the aftermath of the death of his best friend and bandmate Taylor Hawkins

Dave Grohl has spoken in depth for the first time about the loss of his best friend and Foo Fighters bandmate Taylor Hawkins, and the impact of his death.

Hawkins passed away on March 25, 2022 in his room at the Four Seasons Casa Medina hotel in Bogotá, Colombia, ahead of Foo Fighters’ scheduled headline appearance at the Estéreo Picnic festival. Colombian authorities never issued an official cause of death for the 50-year-old drummer, but a preliminary toxicology test indicated that Hawkins had 10 substances in his system at the time of his death, including opioids, benzodiazepines, anti-depressants and THC.

“Losing Taylor was never meant to be,” he tells MOJO magazine. “That threw our world upside down and made me question everything about life… It was so unfair.”

Grohl has spoken numerous times in the past how music helped him cope with the shocking loss of his Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain. More specifically, he poured his grief and pain into the recording of what became the first Foo Fighters album.

“I thought, Okay, I’m gonna get my shit together and demo some stuff at home and then book a session, for myself,” Grohl told me in 2009. “It was some cathartic thing: I needed to punch through this place I’d been trapped.”

In the aftermath of Hawkins’ death, Grohl once more channelled his emotions into his work.

“I think I was afraid of silence, afraid of having to feel,” he tells MOJO. “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.”

For a time, Grohl was making music on a daily basis in his home studio “recording these instrumentals, ranging from something you could hear on [Led Zeppelin’s] Presence to the Bad Brains’ [1982] ROIR cassette.” Out of these solo sessions, the blueprint for a new Foo Fighters album emerged.

“There was no plan to make an album,” Grohl insists to MOJO. But following “a year of writing”, he took the time to revisit the “40 or 50 instrumentals” he’d recorded, and had a vision for what Foo Fighters album number twelve should be.

“There was one stretch of demos, eight in a row, that was punchy, fast, energetic,” he recalls. “I said, That’s what we need.”

The follow-up to 2023’s But Here We Are, the new Foo Fighters album, Your Favorite Toy, will be released via Roswell Records/Columbia Records on April 24. Grohl has described the album as a “powder keg”, and its a collection that has helped his band regain their footing after it felt that their world had crumbled beneath their feet.

“After experiencing death or a long period of grief, you have to do everything all over again within the context of this new life,” Grohl says. “I felt the same the day after Kurt died. I woke up, made a cup of coffee and thought, This is my first cup of coffee since Kurt passed. You retrace your steps with a new perspective, without that other person.”

“When Nirvana ended, I wasn’t finished,” Foo Fighters frontman told me in 2009. “I’m still not fucking finished.” That same message holds true in 2026.

“We realised this was something we needed to do,” Grohl states. “Because it had saved us once before.”

You can read the full interview with Dave Grohl in the new issue of MOJO.

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