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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Entertainment
Casey Cooper-Fiske

Dave Grohl says he had to ‘turn everything off’ after admitting to affair

Dave Grohl has spoken about fathering a child out of wedlock (Ben Birchall/PA) - (PA Archive)

Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl has said he had to “turn everything off” after he admitted to fathering a child outside of his marriage.

The former Nirvana drummer, 57, announced he had become a father to the baby girl on social media in September 2024, saying he was doing “everything I can” to regain his wife Jordyn Blum and their family’s “trust and earn their forgiveness”.

Speaking in an interview with The Guardian, Grohl said: “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.”

The musician, who also featured on albums by Queens Of The Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures, went on to say that songwriting was his way of dealing with the attention the incident brought.

He added: “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.”

Foo Fighters are due to release their 12th studio album, Your Favourite Toy, in April 2026.

Grohl has been married to director Blum since 2003 and together they share daughters Violet, 18, Harper, 15, and Ophelia, 10.

He was previously married to photographer Jennifer Youngblood from 1994 until 1997 and reportedly has acknowledged that infidelity helped lead to their divorce.

With Foo Fighters, Grohl has scored four UK top 10 singles and six UK number one albums.

The band are best known for songs such as All My Life, The Pretender and Monkey Wrench.

The drummer joined grunge band Nirvana in 1990, where he remained until their ending in 1994, which came after the death of lead singer Kurt Cobain, aged 27. With Nirvana, Grohl featured on the albums Nevermind and In Utero.

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