Dave Grohl Says He 'Still' Has a 'Hard Time Making Sense of' Bandmate Taylor Hawkins' Death Almost 4 Years Later

In a lengthy new interview, the Foo Fighters frontman recalls the "void" left behind by the drummer, who died in March 2022 at age 50

NEED TO KNOW

• Dave Grohl opened up about Taylor Hawkins’ death in a new interview published in March 2026
• The Foo Fighters frontman said Hawkins left a “void” behind and revealed that he used music as a “crutch” to cope with the drummer’s 2022 death
• “I still have a hard time making sense of it,” Grohl said of Hawkins’ death

Nearly four years after Taylor Hawkins death, Dave Grohl says he is "still" struggling to make sense of it all.

The Foo Fighters frontman, 57, opened up about losing Hawkins both as a bandmate and on a personal level in a new interview with MOJO Magazine, part of which was published online on Tuesday, March 17 — nearly four years after the drummer’s sudden death in 2022 at age 50.

“Losing Taylor,” Grohl told MOJO of his late bandmate, “was never meant to be,” 

“That threw our world upside down and made me question everything about life, that it was so unfair,” he added of himself and his fellow “My Hero” rockers. “I still have a hard time making sense of it.”

The singer also compared band's need to make and perform music — specifically, their 2023 LP But Here We Are — in the wake of Hawkins’ death (and the subsequent death Grohl’s mom, Virginia) to his need to release the Foo Fighters' debut album after the death of Grohl's Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain.

The “heartbreaking experience” of Cobain’s death in 1994, Grohl told MOJO, led him to release the 1995 self-titled album and tour with it alongside bandmates Pat Smear and Nate Mendel, as well as Foo Fighters’ original drummer William Goldsmith.

After the death of Hawkins — who joined Foo Fighters in Goldsmith’s place not long after, in 1997 — decades later, the “Everlong” rockers decided that the best course of action was to do the same thing: make new music, and take it on the road.

The band “realized this was something we needed to do,” Grohl told the magazine. “Because it had saved us once before…”

“We had this idea,” he said of Here We Are. “We were going to record live, the five of us, and we would play the drum tracks from speakers in the room. We’d hit the chord and play along to these drums.”

“But there was no one there,” Grohl, who ultimately played drums on the 2023 record, continued. “There was just this void, and we were desperately trying to fill it.”

Now, the band is releasing a new album, Your Favorite Toy, on April 24 with current Foo Fighters lineup Grohl, Smear, Mendel, Chris Shiflett, Rami Jaffee and new drummer Ilan Rubin. (Former Nine Inch Nails drummer Rubin replaced Josh Freese, Hawkins’ initial replacement, in 2025, while NIN added Freese to their own lineup.)

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Reflecting on the Foo Fighters after Hawkins death and the making of the band’s upcoming LP — for which he says “there was no plan” originally — Grohl told MOJO he used music like a “crutch” in the wake of the 2022 tragedy.

“I think I was afraid of silence, afraid of having to feel,” he told the outlet, per Rolling Stone. “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.”

Now, the frontman told MOJO, “I’ve had to reexamine my ambition and intention.” Said the rocker: “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. Before, I was running on fumes and unleaded gas. Now, I’m just burning f—ing diesel.”

The Foo Fighters frontman also discussed Hawkins and reflected on the late drummer’s lasting legacy in a February interview on Apple Music's The Zane Lowe Show pegged to Your Favorite Toy. 

"We wake up in the morning and everybody just texts about how much we miss him and how the world's not the same without him, but we still feel him very much,” said Grohl. “We always talk about him every f—ing day.”

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