Jania Ashlynn
The musician did an interview with SiriusXM’s Fierce: Women in Music about her former relationship with Dave Grohl, the frontman for the iconic band the Foo Fighters.
Videos by Rare
Love Affair
The pair were in a relationship from 1999 to 2001. She shared that they “were a very compatible match,” but had different ideas about their individual futures.
“We had a beautiful love affair… We [were] both obsessed, committed to rock music, to the power of music, and both very non-drug addict, technically happy, highly functioning people,” she shared. “So we were very similar, and in many ways, I think, our roles in Hole and Nirvana [are] what subconsciously pushed us together.”
When they first got together, Auf der Maur was parting ways with popular rock band Hole. She started touring with Smashing Pumpkins shortly after. Grohl had just gotten started with Foo Fighters after his stint as a Nirvana drummer.
“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, [who] started very young in our small, cool hometowns in Montreal and D.C.,” she shared. “And 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 and you love me and you want me to go…”
Wanting Different Things
They had plenty of things in common, but Auf der Maur felt a bit jaded about the music industry and wanted to move on from it. Grohl had no intention of leaving it behind. He still had more to accomplish.
“I wanted to retreat from the ginormous corporate hell that our music scene had become, and he was not finished yet and had some more proving or ambitions or business to do,” she shared. “I remember just saying, ‘Don’t you want to just settle down into a cool art scene in D.C. or Montreal and just like, be humans?’ His fire and his ambition was not…”
Auf der Maur added: “And here we are, 20 years later, we’ve got what we wanted: He got to be the biggest rockstar in the world, and I got to be a small-town art factory hero.”
