Dave Grohl‘s ex-girlfriend of a couple of years until the start of the 2000s, ex-Smashing Pumpkins and Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, recently gave SiriusXM insight into their relationship and why it had to end. Melissa claimed that

Melissa started from the beginning:

“We had a beautiful love affair… We [were] both obsessed, committed to rock music, to the power of music, and both very non-drug addict, technically happy, highly functioning people. So we were very similar, and in many ways, I think, our roles in Hole and Nirvana [are] what subconsciously pushed us together.”

By the time the pair broke up in 2001, Melissa recalled the turning point in their relationship by adding:

“I was just leaving Hole and entering this farewell finale tour with The Smashing Pumpkins, Dave was just rising up with the Foo Fighters, we had this beautiful compatible couple of years we were madly in love, but we also really recognized the turning point we were both at, as ’90s musicians that were very close in age, [who] started very young in our small, cool hometowns in Montreal and D.C. And when we broke up in 2001, it was all love. It was purely like, ‘I love you, and I want you to go do what you want to do, and you love me, and you want me to go…”

The former bassist recalled the separation as a result of love for one another’s separate dreams and wanting different things from life by sharing:

“I wanted to retreat from the ginormous corporate hell that our music scene had become, and he was not finished yet and had some more proving or ambitions or business to do. I remember just saying, ‘Don’t you want to just settle down into a cool art scene in D.C. or Montreal and just like, be humans?’ His fire and his ambition was not. Here we are 20 years later; we both got what we wanted, he got to be the biggest rock star in the world, and I got to be a small-town art factory hero.”

Melissa lives with her husband, filmmaker Tony Stone, their 11-year-old daughter River and their nonprofit multidisciplinary art center Basilica Hudson in Hudson, New York, while Grohl just recently released Foo Fighters’ 11th studio album ‘But Here We Are’ and is currently on tour.