Foo Fighters vocalist/guitarist Dave Grohl has opened up about his past infidelity scandal in a new interview. After coming clean about his affair back in September of 2024 and admitting to newly fathering a child outside of his marriage to Jordyn Blum, the band went on a relatively lengthy hiatus.
Speaking with The Guardian of the situation now, Grohl said he sought professional treatment after the incident, telling the publication: “I’ve been in therapy six days a week for 70 weeks. I did the math the other day: over 430 sessions.”
Grohl‘s therapeutic pursuits weren’t just tied to the infidelity, but also to address other matters as well. Outside of some mentally unhealthy behaviors, he also has the various traumas he has found himself dealing with more recently to contend with. Among them, the death of the band’s drummer/vocalist Taylor Hawkins in March of 2022, followed by the passing of Grohl‘s mother Virginia in August of that year. Grohl told The Guardian of seeking professional help:
“I have to be perfectly honest. Writing songs and writing lyrics about these things is sometimes enough. As far as having a deeper, longer conversation about them, I still do reserve a lot of this for my own personal life, as impersonal and public as it may seem. But I think that for many reasons, I wound up in a place that I needed to stop and sit with myself and re-evaluate myself. It’s an ongoing process.”
As for how he approached life after making the public admission of his infidelity, he offered:
“I had to turn everything off, one of those things being my concern for what other people think. Being able to shut off that part of yourself can be sometimes a very healthy exercise in considering life within your immediate radius. Not giving all of that so much currency within yourself that it can completely destroy yourself.”
He further continued on about what he’s uncovered about himself in therapy:
“There were years where I was so overly ambitious with things, like a documentary series on HBO, writing a book, whatever. I think having grown up in suburban Virginia with a public-school teacher as a mother, any opportunity you got, you would take. But over time, you spread yourself so thin. And so I look back and I’m like, God, what was I trying to prove? 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, there’s that emptiness, and you’re like, shit, I need to fill it up with something else.”
When asked if that outlook led to him cheating on his wife, he responded:
“No. I think that’s how I ended up overextending myself and getting lost. I wasn’t sitting with myself and really letting [feelings] go from my head into my heart. Getting to the point where I was just like, I need to stop, turn everything off and find my heart.”
In this interview, his bandmate, bassist Nate Mendel, said the band’s reaction to the infidelity scandal was one of support for both Grohl and his wife to navigate their way through it. Mendel said of finding out the news, “We just all wanted to run and give him a big hug and let him know — both of them — that we are here.”
Guitarist/vocalist Chris Shiflett stated of that:
“When Dave called me that morning. I just thought: take all the time you need. And then my house burned down a few months after that [in the California wildfires.] So having an extensive break wound up being necessary for me.”
Foo Fighters are set to release their new album “Your Favorite Toy” on April 24th and have just debuted its latest single, “Caught In The Echo“.
