Dave Grohl on his hearing loss: “I’ve been reading lips for 20 years”

Dave Grohl has discussed his hearing loss, saying that he’s been lip-reading for years and that COVID mask-wearing has caused further issues for him over the past two years.

The Foo Fighters frontman explained in a new interview how it impacts his life, highlighting that it somehow hasn’t affected his ability to tune into the specifics of recording music.

“If you were sitting next to me right here at dinner, I wouldn’t understand a fucking word you were saying to me the whole fucking time,” Grohl told The Howard Stern Show. “There’s no way. In a crowded restaurant – that’s the worst.”

He added: “The worst thing about this pandemic shit is people wearing masks. “I’ve been reading lips for, like, 20 years… I’m a rock musician. I’m fucking deaf. I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

Despite his condition, Grohl said that decades of experience in the music industry has enabled him to still finely pinpoint sounds in the studio.

“When we go in to make a record, and we’re mixing an album, I can hear the slightest little things,” Grohl said. “My ears are still tuned in to certain frequencies, and if I hear something out of tune or a cymbal that’s not bright enough or something like that. In the mix, I can fucking hear the minutiae of everything we had done to that song.”

He added that he also manages to perform live without wearing ear monitors. Having relied on the same audio technician for 31 years, he said that he feels confident enough to play without them.

“The problem that I have with [ear monitors] is it removes you from the natural atmosphere sound. I wanna hear the audience in front of me… It messes with your spatial understanding of where you are onstage,” he said.

Meanwhile, Grohl said that he hopes to release a full album of new thrash metal music by this Friday (February 25).

The musician was speaking ahead of the release of the band’s supernatural horror comedy film Studio 666, which is set to arrive in cinemas on the same day.

Last week, a track by the fictional band Dream Widow, which features on the Studio 666 soundtrack, was released, and Grohl has now revealed that more new music is on the way from the made-up band in question.