Dave Grohl Opens Up On Mother’s Death And His Musical Tribute

In the latest instalment of Hrishikesh Hirway’s revelatory Song Exploder podcast, Dave Grohl dissected the Foo Fighters’ recent album cut The Teacher – a cathartic, genre-bending epic minted for the band’s recent LP But Here We Are – opening up about its backstory as a tribute to his late mother.

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As hardcore fans of his will know, Grohl was inseparable from his mum Virginia – she was a regular guest onstage  at shows and in behind-the-scenes content from the Foos’ happenings (she also helmed the fantastic book From Cradle To Stage, which explores her role in raising Dave from her own perspective). After a short time in hospital, Virginia Grohl died in July of 2022, aged 84.

An emotionally intense, driving saga that runs the full gamut of tonal exploration across its ten-minute runtime, The Teacher is easily one of the Foo Fighters’ most deliberate releases. It didn’t start that way, however. As Grohl explained to Hirway, the song was always meant to be a tribute to Virginia, but came about largely out of protean experimenting: “I was with [Virginia] for all of the time leading up to her passing,” Grohl said (as transcribed by Consequence), noting that “every day during that period, I would write something on the guitar, because I felt that if I didn’t have that release, I would explode”.

He continued: “I would spend the day at the hospital and then try to translate it musically – with no clear intention of what I was trying to achieve. I was finding these chords and progressions that mirrored the way that I felt.”

At first, the two halves of The Teacher were considered separate ideas. But after Grohl casually thought about combining them, he had the minor epiphany that to properly pay tribute to the most important person in his life, he’d need to have a song weightier than anything the Foos had done prior. That, he said, needed to be “more than a three- or four-minute song” – it needed to be “something much bigger”. Grohl added of his mindset: “She was the most important person in my entire life, so I thought this had to be the most important [piece of] music I ever made.”

Lyrically, the track offers fans a very raw, intimate insight into Grohl’s final moments with his mother. A key line in the first passage, “Where will I wake up?”, came directly from Virginia – it’s the question she posed to her son before she went to sleep for the very last time. It’s repeated several times in the song, before an eruptive musical release that has Grohl instead screaming plainly, “Wake up!” He unpacked this for Hirway: “I think someone’s immediate reaction to seeing someone dying is to wish for them to wake up, but that’s not how it works.”

Grohl went on to say that his experience being in the hospital with Virginia – by her side constantly for her final days of life – was especially important because he’d long worried he wouldn’t be able to be with her in that moment. “One of my greatest fears in life is that I would be gone when this happened – gone on the road, not present for this,” he said. “[But] I was there and we were there together.”

That significance is reflected in The Teacher, with the first half “meant to build to a crescendo, going through the emotion of that experience”, and the second half being a “reflection” on it. “I imagined the song would collapse in on itself [and] deconstruct in this massive wash of noise,” he continued. “To me this was the sound of life ending – your final moments just become this distortion of everything you’ve ever experienced in life, and then it just turns off. But what I now realise is it doesn’t. I don’t believe everything just stops. I truly believe that this is just some sort of transition.”

Grohl looked back fondly on his relationship with Virginia, joking that he was “probably my only friend who liked hanging out with their parent”. The mother and son were “best friends”, he affirmed, and as such The Teacher had to do them justice. “I felt like I had to honor her [and] pay tribute to her with this piece of music,” he said in closing. So that’s when it turned into something other than a song. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever written because I wrote it for such a gigantic reason.”

You can listen to the full breakdown of The Teacher on Song Exploder here, and listen to the track itself below.

The Teacher is the penultimate track on the Foos Fighters’ 11th studio album, But Here We Are, which arrived in June of this year. It also marks the band’s first release to follow the death of legendary drummer Taylor Hawkins, who passed just four months prior to Virginia in March 2022. Grohl performed all the drum parts on the record, with Hawkins’ spot filled by Josh Freese for the band’s live show.

In a glowing review of the album, The Music’s Stephen Green spotlit The Teacher as a standout track, writing: “This ten minutes is the best way Grohl knows how to describe the last year of his life. It's chaotic, painful, angry and but ultimately musical. Music got him to this stage and music will get him to the next.”

Just this month, the Foos wrapped up an Australian stadium tour in support of But Here We Are. The setlists were flourished with deep cuts and the band themselves delivered some of the tightest, most engaging performances we’d ever seen from them. The Music had crew onground for every stop of the tour, and our reviewers in Perth (Boorloo) and Melbourne (Naarm) both found the show to be nothing short of spectacular.