Brantley Gilbert is a different man than he was early in his career. The 37-year-old quit drinking in 2011, after realizing that he could no longer control his alcohol.
“I’m a guy that says if I say I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it or die trying,” Gilbert recalls on Today’s Country Radio with Kelleigh Bannen. “And with alcohol, it got to a point with it where I knew it was something I needed to change and cut back on. I said, ‘You know what? This has a little more control over me than I like, and I just need to get it out of my life,’ and couldn’t do it. Physically. That really frustrated me. Going in and being open to a different route of not being able to do it by myself was kind of humiliating and almost embarrassing to an extent, for about a split second. And then the thought was, ‘Dude, get it out of your life.'”
Gilbert, now married and the father of two, is amazed at how far his life has come, reaching milestones he at one point never thought he would make.
“I wasn’t valuing or prioritizing the things in life that I was raised to value and prioritize,” Gilbert acknowledges. “This chapter of my life, I didn’t plan on making it to 30, to be completely honest. I didn’t ever think I’d be married or have kids. I wanted to be a biker.”
It was after Gilbert already began having some success that he realized his imbibing was more than he needed, or even wanted at that point.
“One night, I’ll never forget, we had when ‘[Country Must Be] Country Wide,’ went No. 1, we threw a little celebration out on the road,” Gilbert recalls. “I looked around and had this thought. It was like, ‘Man, we’re supposed to be celebrating something that an overwhelming majority of people that try to do something with music will never accomplish experience.’ And we’re not really celebrating. We’re doing the same sh–we do every night.”
That night became a pivotal moment for Gilbert, who made the decision while watching the celebration that he needed to quit drinking. His struggle comes out in “So Help Me God,” the title track of his latest studio album. which he wrote with HARDY, Hunter Phelps and Will Weatherly.
“This song, you’re dipping back into an uncomfortable place,” Gilbert concedes. “And in my actual recovery itself, it was not fun, obviously. So going back to that place, it’s not overly comfortable. This song, although it is talking about drinking, it kind of has a multi-meaning. To me, it’s anything in life. How many times have I been in a situation where I’ve been either too proud, too stubborn to accept help, whether it be from God or from a friend, or from anybody. I’m supposed to be a rock. I’m supposed to be able to handle anything on my own, this, that, and the other.”
Gilbert has had to rely heavily on his spiritual beliefs, even now, while he chooses every day to not start drinking again.
“It’s kind of like that saying a lot of people say, ‘God won’t put you through anything you can’t handle,” the Georgia native says. “And I just feel like it’s so far from the truth. He will on a regular basis. That’s when you’re supposed to surrender a little bit, and I sucked at surrendering. But once I made that choice to surrender to that and not to surrender to the addiction, but surrender to getting it out of my life, that song was about accepting that, and being all right asking for help, and more or less just realizing that you don’t have to take on big stuff alone. There are people that we have in our lives that will give anything for us to reach out.”
So Help Me God includes collaborations with Blake Shelton, Vince Gill, Jason Aldean, Toby Keith, HARDY and Jelly Roll Find music and tour dates at BrantleyGilbert.com.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of EB Media / Alexa Campbell
Read ’12 Country Music Singers Who Are Sober’ here.