While Dave Grohl was promoting his 2021 book The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, he told a memorable story to The New Yorker of encountering an Irish hitchhiker wearing a Nirvana t-shirt who inspired him to start making new music again following Kurt Cobain’s suicide. That Irish hitchhiker has now come forward to share his memory of the mythical incident. Lorcan Dunne’s story has been shared on X, where he recalls going on a hitchhiking trip with friends and seeing Grohl on the road. Dunne didn’t recognize him at first, and never even got a ride with Grohl because the “car just tore off away.”

But the interaction made an impression on Grohl and inspired him to get back to making music again. “I was driving around in my rental car on a country road and I saw this hitchhiker kid. As I got closer to him, I saw that he had a Kurt Cobain t-shirt on,” Grohl’s story goes. “It was Kurt’s face looking back at me in the middle of nowhere. And I realized I can’t outrun this, so I need to go home and f**king get back to work. And so I did.” (Consequence of Sound)