VIOLET GROHL: all grown up
The singer and daughter
of rock royalty steps
into her own identity on her
debut album
Words by Anagricel Duran
Captured by Cameron McCool
Violet Grohl is thinking about authenticity before anything else. She is currently at a couple of major turning points in her life: moving beyond adolescence as she turns 20, and beginning to carve out her own path in music. As her surname suggests, she’s the daughter of Foo Fighters frontman and grunge icon Dave Grohl, but she’s intent on stepping out of his shadow on her own terms.
Grohl has been singing since childhood; she’s far from new to this. In his 2021 memoir, her father wrote that Violet was “born to the sound of The Beatles in the background,” a fitting origin story for what followed. She made her preteen singing debut at a stadium during Foo Fighters’ Concrete and Gold tour, stepping onto a stage most never reach. Since then, audiences have watched her voice take shape from the front row, making appearances at select Foo Fighters shows and Nirvana tribute performances. Now, the spotlight isn’t shared, it’s hers.
After years of growing up in public view, she’s now ready to define herself on record. Violet’s debut album, Be Sweet To Me, serves as a document of a person mid-transition, mid-discovery, and, crucially, mid-process. The 11-track LP sees her flex her poetic songwriting and open up a new window into who she is.
“I spent a lot of my teenage years developing my music taste, figuring out the things that I find true enjoyment listening to and the genres or artists that I connect deeply with who bring me the most inspiration,” she shares during a Zoom call from her office. She recently moved into her late grandmother’s house, finally having a space of her own.
“Transitioning into adulthood and moving out, was a big thing, like, ‘Oh my god, I’m living by myself, I have to be a fucking adult,’” she says, opening up about how those massive changes have been “very inspiring in the creative sense and sparked a lot of lyrical and conceptual ideas for songs on the album.”
That influence is most noticeable in ‘Bug In The Cake’, a hard-hitting track with a crisp guitar riff and thrashing drumbeat, while Violet sings about her grandmother kindly haunting her during the chorus: “Smile in the dark, Now I’m allowed / Live how I want with no one around / Turn the tv off so it turns back on / Come on, grandma, play me your favorite song.”
The making of the album also pulled Grohl into new waters, placing her at the heart of the creative process. Working closely with producer Justin Raisen, she abandoned her usual act of writing in solitude and entered a shared creative space where her ideas were shaped, challenged and brought to life.
“I got really lucky, and found a group of people that I ended up becoming very close to and felt comfortable enough to open up and be vulnerable,” Grohl explains with a gleam in her eye while discussing her team. “We all connected on a very deep level, and it made the process seamless, enjoyable, and so much fun.”
She explains that the collaborative work helped her “break through a lot of my perfectionist traits,” and led her to “overcome those mental blocks that I had where I was stopping myself from letting things happen and just self-sabotaging my work.”
“I don’t know why I was so tripped up over these little things before,” she adds. “It helped me pull from different places emotionally that I hadn’t before. It’s so nice to be able to bounce off of people, and then also have them affirm your ideas and bounce off of them as well.”
Opening up about working closely with Raisen, Grohl recalls how he was able to translate ideas, emotions and concepts into sounds and in “such a perfect way. With the lyrical process, I was so drawn to collaborating with him, because I’d never really done that with people before in the way that he and I do it together.”
And thus, Be Sweet To Me was born. The LP finds Grohl dipping into ’90s rock with a splash of heavy, alternative sludge, heard on tracks like ‘Often Others’ and ‘Cool Buzz’, while weaving in the occasional Britpop influence. She balances it all with slower, more enchanting moments like ‘Pool of My Dreams’ and the grungy, slowcore ballad ‘Applefish’.
“I want to make the stuff that feels truest to me and to what I feel inspired by,” she explains. “I’m not ashamed of that at all. I fucking love ’90s rock. It only makes sense that I would lean towards it; it’s all I’ve grown up around.”
A key tool in shaping her sound was a sprawling reference playlist that pulled from a wide range of genres such as trip hop, new wave, Scandinavian black metal, ’70s acoustic folk, and vocal jazz.
“We weren’t using the playlist as, ‘All right, here’s 10 songs that I want my album to sound exactly like,’ it was more so, ‘Here’s three songs that I’ve been listening to today, and there are three, or more elements within those songs that I’m really drawn to and I feel inspired by,” she explains, recalling how they’d focus on how they could use elements from different songs and mesh it with something “completely new and different on top” as a way to keep things fresh, “blending the old and the new to give it familiarity.”
The track ‘Big Memory’ highlights this method as its opening drumbeat is reminiscent of Blur’s ‘Song 2’. Throughout the track, you can hear elements of Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘1979’ via bright jangly guitars and a crisp bassline. Opening up the creation of that track, Grohl excitedly shares: “Collectively, as a band, we’re very proud of that song. Everyone had different places they were referencing from, and you’re picking up on those places that came up in the studio.”
“That song in particular was just a really fun, collaborative moment for all of us,” she adds. “It was a very cool and emotional moment for me because we were all just pulling from the ether, and then it ended up reflecting back in a really interesting way in my own personal life.”
Visually, Grohl drew inspiration from the late filmmaker David Lynch. She found a way to tap into his abstract and visual Lynchian storytelling – most notably in the haunting yet enchanting track ‘Mobile Star’. But how was she able to do that?
After watching Twin Peaks for the first time, the singer became obsessed with the late director and how he “talked about creativity and how he pulls from his pool of consciousness and catches his ideas using Transcendental Meditation to get deeper. It resonated with me so much.” She and Raisen bonded over Lynch and his methods, which helped them “create these really crazy, weird, visual songs that we were totally stoked about.”
Lynch’s ability to draw from his own pain and experiences to create ordinary characters in beautifully dark, surreal stories stayed with Grohl throughout the making of her album.
Be Sweet To Me paints a vivid picture of where Grohl is in her life as well as a clear snapshot of who she is: A woman entering adulthood and reflecting on a moment of transition. But even during this moment of reflection and vulnerability, she never forgets where she comes from.
“I’ve never been ashamed of where I come from, and I’ve never hidden the fact that I come from a musical family. I’m proud of it, and I wouldn’t be what I am without the people who came before me,” Grohl says while explaining how grateful she is to her late grandmother, Virginia Grohl, for letting and encouraging her father chase his dream. “It’s all very important to me.”
