Foo Fighters fans were surprised when the band fired drummer Josh Freese just a few years after taking the place of the late Taylor Hawkins. Freese said he didn’t see the dismissal coming and has been careful to make many comments on it for fear of generating click-bait headlines. “I did really enjoy the two years I spent with those guys, however, and they were good to me … until they weren’t,” he previously said.
Now in a new interview with The Zane Lowe Show, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has shared why Freese was let go during the band’s brief hiatus in 2024 saying that the move “didn’t happen overnight.”
He explained: “In those six or seven months, as a band, we talked about what to do next, a new direction, and thought, ‘Okay, let’s call Josh and let him know that we are going to move on with a different drummer.’ We called, as a band, all of us called, it wasn’t just me. Basically, we called Josh and were, like, ‘Hey, man, that was awesome. That was such a blast, thank you so much, but we are going to move on and find another drummer.’ Since then, there’s been a lot of talk about it but I think Josh said it best when he said that he didn’t feel our music really resonated with him, and that’s really important.”
He continued: “We had Taylor Hawkins as our drummer for 25 years and, beyond being an amazing drummer, he was this incredible spirit. He was this incredible human being and he was our brother. He was our best friend. So, continuing after Taylor was really complicated, not just for us, but for any drummer that was going to come in to like, you know, fill his shoes. … We always talk about him every f*cking day. In everything we do we want to have that energy — we want to have that energy for Taylor.”
Freese previously told The New York Times: “It wasn’t music that I really resonated with. I’m coming in as Dave Grohl’s drummer, and the guy that’s supposed to save the day after the beloved Taylor Hawkins died.” Freese also said that the pressure in replacing someone as admired as Hawkins made him feel “like I had to be firing on all cylinders all the time.”
