It’s been more than 550 days since Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl publicly admitted he’d fathered a child outside his marriage to Jordyn Blum. At the time, Grohl wrote on Instagram, “I’ve recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage. I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her.” He added, “I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.”

In a candid sit-down with The Guardian, the 57-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer finally opened a window into the aftermath. It’s work – relentless, almost punishing work. “Six days a week for 70 weeks,” he said of his therapy schedule. That’s more than 430 sessions.

When the interviewer pointed out the timeline, how it seemed to line up with his public admission, Grohl didn’t bite on the neat narrative. “There were so many things that led me to this therapy,” he said, pulling the lens wider. Because this isn’t just about infidelity, it’s grief stacked on grief. The loss of his mother, Virginia Grohl, in August 2022. The sudden death of drummer Taylor Hawkins earlier that same year, while on tour.

Pressed to go deeper on the scandal, Grohl drew a line that felt honest, if a little guarded. “I have to be perfectly honest. Writing songs and writing lyrics about these things is sometimes enough,” he said. “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. I wound up in a place that I needed to stop and sit with myself and re-evaluate myself. It’s an ongoing process.”

After posting his admission, he said he had to “turn everything off,” stepping back from the churn of public opinion. Not out of indifference, but survival. It became, in his words, a “very healthy exercise” in focusing on “life within your immediate radius,” rather than letting the outside noise hollow you out.

Because if there’s a throughline here, it’s that Grohl knows what it means to run on momentum. HBO series, books, records, tours, he’s done all of it, often at once. He now looks back on that period, Sonic Highways, The Storyteller, and wonders what exactly he was trying to prove.

“There is such a thing as addiction to achievement, and it’s dangerous,” he said. “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… and you’re like, shit, I need to fill it up with something else.”

When asked if that same restless drive fed into his infidelity, Grohl let out what was described as a grim laugh. “No. I think that’s how I ended up overextending myself and getting lost,” he said. “I wasn’t sitting with myself… getting to the point where I was just like, I need to stop, turn everything off and find my heart.”

People around him have noticed the shift. Bassist Nate Mendel says Grohl’s recalibrated, placing the band’s ambitions “in a different place, ambition-wise.” Translation: the center of gravity has moved. There’s more life outside the machine now.

When the news first broke, the band hit pause, canceling a planned tour, adding to a run of disruptions that already included pandemic delays and the devastating loss of Hawkins. Guitarist Pat Smear summed up the internal response in a way only a band like this can: “We just all wanted to run and give him a big hug… [and] let him know, both of them… that we are here.”

As for whether his public admission helped repair things at home, Grohl deflected, sort of. He pointed instead to the band’s recent single, Your Favorite Toy. “I think they speak volumes,” he said. “Maybe more than I can speak right now.” He described the track as “one side of yourself screaming at the other… I’m almost taunting myself for all of those things that needed to be examined.”

Since Hawkins’ death, Grohl says he’s been visited by the people he’s lost in dreams that don’t quite feel like dreams. “I have had these dreams that seem like visitations,” he said. “Whether it’s from my mother, or my old friend Jimmy, or Kurt, or my father… it’s as if they’ve never left.”

Grohl goes on to describe one of these visitations: he’s asleep on the couch, TV flickering, and wakes up to find Hawkins sitting beside him. “It was so fucking real,” Grohl said. “He was happy. His hair looked great; he was tan.” The first thing out of his mouth: “oh my God, we miss you so much.” Hawkins just smiles. Grohl asks, “where are you?” Another smile. “Dude—” And then he wakes up.

“I was like: ‘fuck, I almost had it!’”

The Foo Fighters 12th studion album, Your Favorite Toy, is out April 24 via Roswell Records and RCA Records. The band’s intimate show at St. James Church in Dingle, Ireland, played last month for just 80 fans, will stream worldwide on April 6 at 4:30 p.m. ET via the RTÉ Player.