What Dave Grohl's Exes Have Said About Him
Not only one of the most famous contemporary rock musicians on the planet, Dave Grohl is also one of the most prolific. After drumming for the grunge-defining, iconically '90s band Nirvana, he moved to lead singer and guitar duties for Foo Fighters, a band still plugging away nearly 30 years after its formation, while also spending time playing in Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Grohl is almost as famous for his romantic life as he is for his music, and that part of his world has also seen a lot of turnover. Across his three decades in the spotlight, Grohl has been romantically linked to a number of famous women, most of them fellow alternative rock stars, as well as some actors. Married briefly in the '90s to photographer Jennifer Youngblood and since 2003 to TV producer Jordyn Blum, Grohl also reportedly engaged in some low-key flings with Winona Ryder and "Sliders" star Kari Wuhrer.
None of those women have spoken out on their relationship with Grohl, but others have. Here's a glimpse into the offstage side of Dave Grohl, from the perspective of his former romantic partners.
Jennifer Finch
L7 is a Los Angeles-based hard rock band that formed in the mid-1980s and became associated with Seattle-oriented grunge acts a few years later. Memorable for snarky, snarling alternative rock radio hits like "Pretend We're Dead" and "Andres," L7's musicians ran in the same circles as the members of Nirvana — bassist Jennifer Finch's former Sugar Babylon bandmate Courtney Love married Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, and Finch and Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl were a couple for a short period in the early 1990s.
In the 2016 documentary "L7: Pretend We're Dead," Finch explained that when her band was recording the 1992 album "Bricks Are Heavy" with Butch Vig, the producer's previous project, Nirvana's "Nevermind," hit stores. "And it blew up," Finch said. In '90s-era footage in the documentary, Finch is shown looking through a magazine with Nirvana — including Grohl — on the cover. "Everywhere I go, everywhere I turn, I see this f***ing face," Finch said. "Frankly, I'm sick of it."
Finch doesn't like to talk much about that period of her life, and couldn't bring herself to watch the Nirvana-heavy documentary "Montage of Heck." "I have my own memories of those times, and those memories are at a point where they are fading," Finch told The Big Takeover in 2015. "I don't want someone else's ingrained into my brain."
Louise Post
After his divorce from first wife Jennifer Youngblood, Dave Grohl began a romance with Louise Post of the alternative rock band Veruca Salt. When Grohl recorded Foo Fighters' second album, 1997's "The Colour and the Shape," he sought out Post's help on what would become the hit single "Everlong." Grohl called Post in the middle of the night and woke her to sing backup vocals, over the phone, on the tune.
"He wanted me to sing the doo-doo's, which were inspired by our song 'Shimmer Like a Girl,'" Post wrote on Veruca Salt's Instagram account in 2021, adding that she also wrote and sang a harmony for the song's chorus, and that the whispered vocals in "Everlong" started out as a description of the dream she was having when Grohl woke her. "It was a dream about us. He later removed it and replaced [it] with his own whispers, one which was a love letter to me," she wrote.
The relationship came to an abrupt conclusion in 1997. Grohl called Post just before a Veruca Salt gig in Australia and ended things so he could have a dalliance with Winona Ryder. Grohl may have inspired the 2000 Veruca Salt song "Disconnected," which includes the lyric, "It's kind of scary when your lover leaves you for a movie star." "People definitely read things into my songs," Post told The Sydney Morning Herald. "It was a private relationship, but it got so much publicity. I didn't mean for it to happen. I'm friends with him now."
Tina Basich
In the late 1990s, Dave Grohl dated Tina Basich, one of the most accomplished snowboarders of all time. She helped pioneer the sport, won titles at the X Games and the U.S. Open, and famously became the first woman to complete a backside 720 in competition. "I really changed my priorities when I started dating Dave, because I was really in love with him. And that really changed my snowboarding," Basich told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
The relationship ended in 1999, right around the time that Basich broke a leg, sidelining her professional snowboarding career for months. During her convalescence, Basich got word that Grohl allegedly was secretly seeing another woman. "Breakups suck. But Rockstar exits are the worst," Basich wrote in her 2003 memoir, "Pretty Good for a Girl." "All I got was a five-minute phone call from him, after five weeks of me calling and trying to get ahold of him because I just had to know if these rumors were true."
Basich found the split so devastating and traumatic that she couldn't even bring herself to broach the topic of the relationship when writing early drafts of "Pretty Good for a Girl." "It was really hard for me. I rewrote my book five times and not until the fifth rewrite did Dave Grohl make the book," Basich said.
Melissa Auf der Maur
Dave Grohl engaged in a years-long legal feud regarding the use of Nirvana's music with Kurt Cobain's widow, Courtney Love. Around the same time that Melissa Auf der Maur resigned from her position as bassist in Love's band Hole in 1999, she entered into what would be a long-term relationship with the Foo Fighters frontman. According to Auf der Maur, it was a happy and healthy coupling from beginning to end. She characterized their pairing as "a very compatible match" in a 2023 interview on "Fierce: Women in Music" on Sirius XM (via People). "We had a beautiful love affair," she explained. "Both obsessed, committed to rock music, to the power of music, and both very non-drug addict, technically happy, highly functioning people." Auf der Maur suspects that their similar status as supporting players in major, lead singer-driven '90s grunge rock bands "subconsciously pushed us together."
However, all that wasn't enough to keep Auf der Maur and Grohl together for good. "We were madly in love, but we also really recognized the turning point we were both at, as '90s musicians that were very close in age," Auf der Maur explained. Grohl wanted to turn Foo Fighters into one of the world's biggest bands, while she was content with smaller aspirations. "When we broke up in 2001, it was all love. It was purely like, 'I love you and I want you to go do what you want to do.'"
Kathleen Hanna
Kathleen Hanna brought explicitly progressive and feminist politics to early 1990s alternative rock, singing and writing songs for the influential "riot grrrl" movement-affiliated band Bikini Kill. Hanna also bore witness to the formation of one of the decade's other important bands and provided the catalyst for its breakthrough song.
Bikini Kill emerged from the music scene in the Seattle-adjacent college town of Olympia, Washington, and so did Nirvana. "We were there when Dave first showed up and became the new drummer and was sleeping on Kurt's couch," Hanna told the Chicago Tribune, regarding her short-term romantic partner Dave Grohl and friend Kurt Cobain. Grohl would later play drums on "Smells Like Teen Spirit," a song title that Cobain derived from something Hanna wrote on his bedroom wall with a felt-tip pen while very drunk and name-checking the Teen Spirit brand of deodorant: "Kurt smells like teen spirit."