Dave Grohl Says Losing Taylor Hawkins ‘Threw Our World Upside Down’

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 precent 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?”

The Foos played their first show with Rubin in September 2025, and their new LP Your Favorite Toy arrives on April 24. They promoted it with a series of intimate UK shows in February, and are kicking off an American tour April 28 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They’ll spend much of the summer playing U.S. stadium shows with Queens of the Stone Age, and Mannequin Pussy.

“I’ve had to re-examine my ambition and intention,” Grohl told Mojo. “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. 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. Before, I was running on fumes and unleaded gas. Now I’m just burning fucking diesel.”