Dave Grohl Reveals Teenage Heartbreak Led Him to Pursue Music

Artists all have their own reasons as to why they got started in music in the first place, and for Dave Grohl, it was a tremendous heartbreak he endured as a teenager that led him down the path to rock superstardom.

When he was in the seventh grade, Grohl met a girl named Sandy and asked her out. She agreed, and was his "girlfriend" for about a week.

"She was my first love. So this was the first time my heart ever felt that feeling, where you see this beautiful girl and you want her to love you, and you want her to be yours," Grohl recalled to Howard Stern. "So when she accepted my offer to be the future Mrs. Grohl, I was overjoyed. I mean this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me."

"Now I'd only been playing guitar for maybe about two years or three years, so I barely even knew how to do that," he continued, making note of the KISS and Led Zeppelin posters he had hanging in his room at the time. "So when she told me that she didn't want to be the future Mrs. Grohl, I was so heartbroken that I turned to the guitar."

Grohl cited that moment as the start of the connection between music and his heart. After all of the songs he had listened to about love and heartbreak by other artists, he now understood what it was that those songs were about because he felt it too.

He then came to the realization that the only way he was going to overcome his heartache was to become a rock star.

"I turned my pain and the heartbreak in that direction. But I did have this dream that night where I was onstage in an arena playing a lead at the lip of the stage, and the audience is going fucking nuts… And I look down and she's in the front row crying. Like, consumed with regret," the rocker remembered.

Coincidentally, about 25 years later, Grohl was playing a show in his hometown — which he compared to a high school reunion — and Sandy was there. The dream he had after the break up nearly became a reality, except that she wasn't crying in the crowd, she was laughing. Apparently, he had told her about the dream once prior to the show, and she knew he was trying to recreate the visual for himself.

Thanks for breaking Grohl's heart, Sandy. Watch the full interview below.

Dave Grohl Reveals Teenage Heartbreak Led Him to Pursue Music