Home Music Trey Anastasio, Jason Isbell, Ben Harper & Others Discuss Sobriety With GQ

Trey Anastasio, Jason Isbell, Ben Harper & Others Discuss Sobriety With GQ

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Trey Anastasio, Jason Isbell, Ben Harper, Steven Tyler, Joe Walsh and Julien Baker are among the musicians who discussed their sobriety with GQ. Author Chris Heath asked a series of questions to the group of musicians who spoke candidly about the role drugs and alcohol has in their lives.

The questions posed cover the musicians’ current statuses and their past substance abuse issues. The artists are asked about their decisions to get sober, what scared them about the process and what worries them most about remaining clean. There’s talk of relapsing, the helpful advice they’ve received, how sobriety affects their creative processes and several other aspects of their lives.

When asked, “Do you miss anything about how you used to be?” Anastasio responded:

It’s a “we” thing and not a “me” thing. It’s not all about me. This is what I learned in sobriety, that kind of thinking. I think about my other band members, I think about the men and women on the crew, and I think about the people who work in the building, and I try to walk onstage in that mind-set. It’s a very different kind of mind-set: Is it more important to walk into a venue and say hi to the guy who works in the garage, or is it more important to be good? Because being good got me into jail. It was a whole lot of nothing.

Harper responded to the same question by stating:

God, I had some great times, but those great times don’t measure up to the times that I’m having now, sober. Alcohol-induced great times are a bit fleeting, where sober great times have a stronger sense of permanence to them, for me. The memories are clearer, they’re more sincere.

They were asked, “How has being sober affected what you can and can’t create?” Isbell stated:

I’ve always answered that question with: It gave me more time to work, and more focus. And that’s most certainly true. But that’s not the whole answer. I think sobering up gave me a story to tell. And the story was still happening. I was still in the middle of it. So the fact that I just dove headfirst 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’t all about sobriety. Most of them aren’t 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’s all so very closely intertwined, that if I’m writing about driving to the grocery store, I’m writing about sobriety. If I’m writing about my relationship with my wife, I’m writing about sobriety. If I’m writing about something that happened in the 1860s in Texas, I’m writing about my sobriety.

Follow this link to GQ to read the full interview and special essay by always-sober rapper Vince Staples.

[Hat Tip – @MikeHamad]