Dave Grohl admits Taylor Hawkins’ death turned Foo Fighters’ “world upside down”
Dave Grohl has opened up about the tragic loss of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins in 2022.
Hawkins sadly died, aged just 50, during Foo Fighters’ South American tour shortly before the band were due to headline a festival in Colombia.
A toxicology report, issued by the Attorney General’s Office of Colombia, later revealed that ten substances were found in Hawkins‘ system.
Following his death, Foo Fighters cancelled all of their future commitments. They later returned in 2023 with the new album, But Here We Are, which was dedicated to Hawkins, as well as Grohl’s late mother, Virginia.
Now, Grohl has looked back on the devastating impact that losing Hawkins, who served as a member of the band for a quarter of a century, had on the band.
“Losing Taylor was never meant to be,” Grohl conceded in a new interview with Mojo, before adding, “That threw our world upside down and made me question everything about life, that it was so unfair. I still have a hard time making sense of it.”
He also explained how the lack of Hawkins’ presence loomed over the recording of But Here We Are, admitting, We had this idea. 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 mournfully added, “There was just this void, and we were desperately trying to fill it.”
However, the Foo Fighters frontman, who previously started the project in 1995 as a way of grieving Kurt Cobain, knew that getting back in the studio was the right thing to do and “realised this was something we needed to do”, noting, “because it had saved us once before”.
Last month, during an interview with Apple Music 1, Grohl also said of Hawkins, “The thing about Foo Fighters is that we’ve had four drummers in 30 years, but with the Foo’s, we had Taylor Hawkins as our drummer for 25 years, and beyond being an amazing drummer, he was this incredible spirit, this incredible human being, he was our brother, he was our best friend.”
Grohl then explained that it was going to be “complicated” for “any drummer” that came into the band as Hawkins’ replacement, in reference to Josh Freese’s short spell behind the drum kit for the But Here We Are album cycle.
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