{"id":1302433,"date":"2019-01-15T09:53:54","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T16:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cmt.com\/news\/?p=1802236"},"modified":"2019-01-15T09:53:54","modified_gmt":"2019-01-15T16:53:54","slug":"jason-isbell-shares-his-sobering-truths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/music-news\/jason-isbell-shares-his-sobering-truths\/","title":{"rendered":"Jason Isbell Shares His Sobering Truths"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

by Alison Bonaguro<\/a><\/span> 28m ago<\/span><\/span> <\/p>\n

Country music isn\u2019t nearly as boozy as it once was. More and more artists are getting sober, keeping their tours dry, and trying to stay on a healthy path. Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Trace Adkins, JoDee Messina, Brantley Gilbert and more have been open about their struggles with addiction over the years. But nobody\u2019s been quite as candid as Jason Isbell.<\/p>\n

In a new story in the February issue of GQ.com<\/a>, Isbell and other singer-songwriters shared their stories about the climb back up after hitting rock bottom.<\/p>\n

And it sounds like music is what pulled Isbell out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wrote my way through it. I think part of the process for me of sobering up, and I don\u2019t know that I\u2019ve ever put it this way before or really thought about it this way before, was using my work to connect with the world that I had always felt so isolated from. And I think probably my survival instinct kicked in and said, \u2019Well, what you do is you use these songs to connect with people in a way that you\u2019ve not connected with them before.\u2019 And after that, I sort of felt like I belonged in the world,\u201d Isbell told the magazine. He also credits his wife as being the catalyst for change. \u201cI was trying to establish a long-term relationship with her, and it became pretty clear to me that she wasn\u2019t going to be in a long-term relationship with a drunk.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that was my first real motivation to get sober. I don\u2019t think I would have done it \u2014 I certainly wouldn\u2019t have done it at that point \u2014 if it hadn\u2019t been for her. I had told her once before, when she and I weren\u2019t too far along, that I think I need to quit drinking and I didn\u2019t think I could do it on my own, because I tried before and not had any luck. And I said, \u2019I think I\u2019m gonna need help doing this, go to rehab or something like that, because I don\u2019t know how to do it on my own.\u2019 She said, \u2019If you still feel that way 24 hours from now, you\u2019re going into rehab,\u2019 and sure enough, the next day I told her the same thing. It was the middle of the night, and I was obviously really drunk. She called a bunch of people that were my friends and whose opinions I respected \u2014 it took a lot of courage and care on her part \u2014 and figured out how to get me into rehab.\u201d<\/p>\n

Isbell\u2019s next stop was the Cumberland Heights Recovery Center in Nashville. He said he was mostly just drinking, but that he did some drugs just to keep drinking. A little bit of cocaine or some painkillers to sober himself up so he could keep drinking. How much drinking? \u201cI would say probably a fifth of Jack Daniel\u2019s a day.\u201d He called the stay at Cumberland Heights painful, and much more difficult than losing a job. He recalls worrying about things like, \u201cAm I going to be funny? Attractive? Interesting?\u201d Eventually, he learned that he\u2019d be even better than when he was drinking. \u201cBut the addiction in your brain, that\u2019s a tricky son of a bitch. It had me convinced for a long time that I wasn\u2019t going to enjoy my life, that nobody was going to enjoy being around me if I wasn\u2019t raising hell all the time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The path to sobriety also taught Isbell that he had to take these steps for himself, and not for anyone else. \u201cAfter you start the first steps, and you start working your way towards being a more functional person, and a sober person, a clear-headed person, you start seeing the results, and then it becomes about you, it becomes something that you\u2019re doing for yourself. Which I think is something that has to happen. If you\u2019re just getting sober for somebody else, even if it\u2019s someone you\u2019re in love with, I don\u2019t think it\u2019ll last.\u201d<\/p>\n

And these days, Isbell is finally in a confident place. He no longer worries about relapsing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat used to be a craving for alcohol is now more of a romanticized memory. I let the tape play out, watch the movie until the end and see what it would really do and what would really happen, rather than just remember the buzz,\u201d he admitted. \u201cIt was a major change, and it was terrifying, but the farther you get into the woods, the less scary the woods appear. And the more time I spent working on what had caused me to be a drunk in the first place, the less afraid I was of that particular ghost returning. And as time went on, it went from being a frightening experience to being an enlightening experience. So now I look back on it with nothing but fond memories, and I see it as sort of this beautiful renaissance in my life that made everything that\u2019s happened possible. But, you know, at the time it was like losing a friend.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do miss certain things. But the minuses are a lot more than the pluses of ever going back to that life. If I were to relapse and stay that way, then I would miss everything about the life that I have now. Not just two or three moments that I probably remember very differently from how they actually happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

The happy ending to his story is that Isbell now has a real story to tell.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that I just dove head\ufb01rst into my work gave me an opportunity to actually document, in real time, the changes that I was going through. And luckily I had the technical ability as a songwriter to do that in a way that sort of let everybody in on what I was dealing with, the questions that I was trying to answer. And, you know, it made my career happen. It gave me everything, really, that I have now. The songs aren\u2019t all about sobriety. Most of them aren\u2019t at all about sobriety. But in a way, they are all about that. Because to get sober and stay that way, I think you have to understand what part that plays in your life. It\u2019s all so very closely intertwined, that if I\u2019m writing about driving to the grocery store, I\u2019m writing about sobriety. If I\u2019m writing about my relationship with my wife, I\u2019m writing about sobriety. If I\u2019m writing about something that happened in the 1860s in Texas, I\u2019m writing about my sobriety.\u201d<\/p>\n

If he hadn\u2019t done the work to get sober and stay sober, Isbell predicted what his life would look like now:<\/p>\n

\u201cI would probably have been a struggling songwriter and touring musician, and probably would have thought that my music was just going over everybody\u2019s head. Or I was born too late: all these excuses that people give when your work is not quite strong enough or when they don\u2019t work hard enough or aren\u2019t able to focus,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I would have just kept on drinking and kept on ruining relationships.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I would have my wife and my daughter, and I certainly wouldn\u2019t have a big pile of Grammys and all that kind of shit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a tweet on Tuesday (Jan. 15), Isbell shared simply that he was proud to be part of the story.<\/p>\n

\n

Proud to be part of this. https:\/\/t.co\/tqP5JbJdrq<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jason Isbell (@JasonIsbell) January 15, 2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
Alison makes her living loving country music. She’s based in Chicago, but she’s always leaving her heart in Nashville.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

via:: CMT News<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Alison Bonaguro 28m ago Country music isn\u2019t nearly as boozy as it once was. More and more artists are getting sober, keeping their tours dry, and trying to stay on a healthy path. Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Trace Adkins, JoDee Messina, Brantley Gilbert and more have been open about their struggles with addiction over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1302433","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-24 02:56:10","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1302433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1302433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1302433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1302433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}