Violet Grohl
It’s been a long time coming but Violet Grohl is finally ready for her closeup – with a debut album that rivals some of the 90s greats, she’s here to forge her own path.
Words: Charlotte Gunn. Photos: Milly Cope. Creative Direction: Emily Barker
Violet Grohl was twelve when she knew – with complete certainty – that she wanted to be a musician. “It was around the time I started singing backing vocals for my Dad”, she tells The Forty-Five. “It was such a crazy experience.”
The clue’s in the name, but she wasn’t exactly tra-la-la-ing behind Pops down his local pub; Violet’s pre-teen debut was in front of a stadium full of North American fans on Foo Fighters’ Concrete and Gold tour. Her father, Dave Grohl (OG Foo Fighter and former Nirvana drummer), grinning and pointing at his daughter with pride from centre stage. “That’s my boo!”
But fatherly love alone doesn’t earn you a near-permanent place as a Foo Fighters’ backing vocalist – you need some serious musical chops. And whether by nature or nurture, Violet has ‘em.
And it’s here, then, that we should probably begin. Violet and I are sat opposite each other, cross-legged on a bed, in an eclectic little North London flat with trinkets and tchotchkes at every turn. It’s the day of her first-ever cover shoot – she’s in town to start promoting her upcoming debut album ‘Be Sweet To Me’, an unapologetic rock record that, despite Violet’s modest nineteen years, has been a long time coming.
In person, Violet is sweet and polite, gushing about how much she loves London (“the architecture! The big grassy fields!”). She has her mother, actor and director Jordyn Blum’s piercing blue eyes that well up as she talks about her love of music.
But the rest is all Grohl. And not just her dad – familial influence dating back to her paternal grandparents, who set in motion a love of music that would shape the generations that followed. There’s not a hint of precociousness to her, nor is she a wallflower. She chats away freely and enthusiastically about the process of making her debut record. Not shying away from her lineage, Grohl’s debut is steeped in 90s influences. Be it the dream-pop of Cocteau Twins on ‘Pool Of My Dreams’ or the DC hardcore-indebted ‘Cool Buzz’, it’s a record that says: I know who I am and I’m proud of it.
Enrolled in the school of rock from birth, morning trips to school in the San Fernando Valley were soundtracked by the 90s alt-rock canon of PJ Harvey, The Muffs and Juliana Hatfield and the experimental sounds of Bjork. Picking up a ukulele and, latterly, guitar, Violet taught herself to play music and write poetry. Aided by a voice that can belt out a gravelly rock song with the same conviction as a jazz standard, and perhaps, a debut album was always an inevitability.
By thirteen, around the time when most of us were discovering Nirvana, Violet was playing with them. At a one-off LA reunion show (only the fourth time the band had publicly linked up since Kurt Cobain’s passing) she joined Krist Novoselic, Pat Smear and Dave Grohl on stage. And despite the familiarity, the weight of the occasion wasn’t lost on her.
“I was like, holy shit, we get to do Nirvana songs?”, she says, gleefully at the memory. “And then they asked me what song I wanted to do and I just said; ‘I want to do ‘Heart Shaped Box’’. And it was SO much fun. It just felt so right.”
Though many of her early musical experiences were utterly atypical, Violet was still a teenage girl, growing up in an age where another teenage girl was making serious waves.
“I’ve been following Billie Eilish since the beginning – like, since her SoundCloud days,” Violet admits. “I love her. She’s a lovely person. Watching her open up this path for female musicians in this alternative pop space that’s still beautiful, it was just so incredible to me. I watched her play live a handful of times in 2018 and it was just insane.” She recalls a moment side of stage at Camp Flog Gnaw, when Eilish’s dad handed her his ear set so she could listen to Billie’s isolated vocals. “I was crying so hard the whole time, because it was so raw and so beautiful. And I was just like, this is all I want to do. It totally lit a fire under my ass.”
“Watching Billie Eilish open up this path for female musicians was just so incredible to me.”
Violet Grohl
You can hear hints of Eilish’s dreamlike vocals on ‘Be Sweet To Me’. But there’s a lot of grit here too. At first, Violet explored different genres. A stint (at age 14) singing jazz songs in LA bars with David Bowie’s long-term pianist, Mike Garson (as you do), and a love of Amy Winehouse, initially sent her down a more soulful route. But it wasn’t until she met producer Justin Raisen (Kim Gordon, Charli XCX) that everything clicked. “I knew by the time I met Justin that I wanted to make alternative rock music. That’s what felt right to me at that time of my life. And we just had this weird telepathic thing,” she explains of the pairing. Together with a revolving door of musicians, the pair wrote the record from scratch together in the studio. Violet would bring in playlists to spark ideas, the breadth of her musical references – trip hop, folk, Scandinavian black metal – impressive fodder for Raisen.
The collective leaned into Brian Eno’s famed Oblique Strategies – a card-based approach that prompts creatives to get out of their comfort zone with directives such as “use an old idea” or “don’t be frightened to display your talents” – to prompt ideas.
“I love tarot and we used the Brian Eno cards like tarot, almost. We would lay three out on the table. Then everyone would start to write down ideas on little pieces of paper and just chuck them into a Bongo. Then we’d shuffle everything up and pull them out and read them aloud,” she explains. “The mix of everyone’s ideas together would make stuff that none of us individually could come up with. It was so fun and spontaneous.”
For a record made by what Raisen describes as a “Wrecking Crew” of musicians, it’s remarkably cohesive. Layered, grungey guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Queens of the Stone Age record are juxtaposed with Grohl’s melodic vocals. The result is an alt-rock album that stands up against some of the big hitters of the genre.
On grunge bop, ‘Bug In The Cake’, she reminisces about moving into her late grandma’s house with a Nirvana-referencing refrain –“Moving to grandma’s, moving to grandma’s, moving to grandma’s” – that bounces around your head for days. The song was born from personal experience. Not wanting to see her beloved grandma’s house torn down by developers after her passing, Violet moved in: a bold decision for a teenager, living alone for the first time. And soon, strange things started to occur…
“One night, I went to drop off a bunch of stuff and I heard someone talking in the back of the house, and I was like, ‘did somebody break in?’ I had been there the night before and had turned everything off,” she recalls, in a hushed tone. “I walked into my grandma’s bedroom, and the TV was on her favourite news channel, MSNBC. It tripped me out so bad. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, Nana, you did that. You totally did that.”
Though Grohl found the experience comforting, the loss of her grandma was just one moment in a series of tough life events that led to a sonic shift mid-way through making the record. “The vibe I had originally intended no longer felt authentic to how I was feeling,” she noted in the record’s press release. “I needed sludge and crazy reverb. It felt really good to be able to transmute whatever pain and sadness I was feeling into something tangible.”
Turning painful experiences into art was something Violet discovered at a young age. “When I’m in an emotionally vulnerable place, or I’m very sensitive, I’m more open.’ she explains. “There’s something about it that puts me in this perfect temperature where it’s the sweet spot to finding stuff that resonates very deeply with me, I guess. “Making this album, I was definitely unpacking a lot of past pain and stuff that was going on in my life. But it just came out the way it came out. I wasn’t looking for feel, particularly.”
That seismic emotional shift is felt most prominently moving from track six, ‘Mobile Star’; an Eilish-indebted shoegaze track inspired by Ian Curtis’ death and “the pressure to be a certain way” into ‘Often Others’ – the record’s heaviest song: a sludge anthem with doom-laden, droning guitars. “There’s so much emotion behind a sludgy guitar,” she shares of the artistic choice. “It feels like a gut punch.”
On ‘Cool Buzz’, Grohl prods at the hypocrisy of men in the hardcore scene, who pretend to be progressive but still don’t welcome women into their spaces.
“It still feels like an exclusive scene,” laments Grohl. “Especially when you wanna listen to really hardcore shit and run around and mosh, there’s a lot of ‘Oh, you’re too delicate, you’re too feminine, this isn’t your place,’ she sighs. “ But I do wanna be in that space and I know there are a lot of other girls who want to be there too. So I think more girls should make punk music, if these spaces aren’t gonna allow it.”
Grohl has found community in a handful of female musicians her age. Her best friend, Persia Numan (daughter of Gary) has more than a little insight into her unique upbringing. The pair collaborated on ‘What’s Heaven Without You’, a track written in the wake of David Lynch’s passing (Lynch was also an influence on ‘Be Sweet To Me’). She namechecks Dora Jar as a friend in the music scene (“she’s so whimsical and sweet”). But the boys, she has less time for.
“I don’t like male musicians my age,” she deadpans. “I don’t care. They have attitude problems. They’ve been saying this about us for so fucking long – it’s time that they sit down, be quiet and play their music,”
“I don’t like male musicians my age – they have attitude problems. They’ve been saying this about us for so long, but it’s time they sit down, be quiet and play their music”
Violet Grohl
Already versed in the challenges of being a woman in rock – though blessed to have found a simpatico relationship with Raisen – Grohl’s learned from the women who have come before her.
“The best advice I’ve been given is that it’s OK to say no or that you don’t want to do something,” she says confidently. “For a lot of women, it took them a really long time to accept and implement that into their lives. It’s inspiring to be around the kinds of people who don’t give a fuck and will say whatever they feel.”
At nineteen, Violet seems to have a lot worked out already And most importantly, she’s made a record that makes the conversation about her surname feel irrelevant. “I’m beyond grateful for the life that I was born into,” she says, fully tapped into the discourse. “It’s such a privilege to be able to be around musicians and in a space that nurtures my interest and allows me to grow and to make a record.
“Obviously, doors are open for me because of my last name,” she eye-rolls. “It’s not something I’m ever going to hide behind or say, ‘No, I worked so hard for this! You guys shouldn’t say that! That hurts my feelings.’ I don’t care – I really don’t. I’ve heard that since I was 13 years old. So call me a Nepo Baby all you want. It’s ‘whatever’ to me. I just hope that eventually people will give me a shot.”
This summer, Grohl will play Reading and Leeds festival for the first time, just like Nirvana did thirty-five years ago. A smattering of UK shows is also on the cards. As her team prepares to whisk her off to Paris for a run of European press, she ends our conversation with a request – or perhaps a challenge – for the naysayers.
“Come see me live,” she urges. “Come listen to my music and then you can decide for yourself if I’m worthy of this career or not.”
She pauses, those big blue eyes glistening a little. “This is my passion, this is my thing – and it’s all I want to do.”
‘Be Sweet To Me’ is out May 29 via Auroura Records. Pre-order now.
The Forty-Five team:
Creative Direction: Emily Barker for Trophy Wife
Photography: Milly Cope
Styling: Meg Howarth
Hair: Emma Small
Make Up: Ruby Yu
Set Design: Jade Creighton
