Charles Kelley is opening up about his sobriety. In a far-reaching interview with CBS This Morning, the Lady A singer and his wife, Cassie, open up about his alcohol abuse, and the moment he almost lost his marriage to drinking.
“I’ll admit I went to a rehab facility for a month,” Kelley says. “I was scared to death. I’d had several people, several therapists, suggest and I said, ‘No. I will never, ever go into a rehab facility.'”
At the time, Kelley believed his drinking wasn’t excessive enough to warrant going into treatment, in spite of numerous conversations with Cassie, along with his band members Hillary Scott and Dave Haywood, about how his drinking was negatively impacting them. But after yet another night of over-imbibing while overseas, Cassie was ready to end their marriage, when Kelley finally agreed to get help.
“We got in an argument, and I just turned my phone off, in the middle of nowhere, and just took off, and stayed up drinking with all these random people I didn’t know,” Kelley recalls. “I literally woke up at 7:00 and called her.”
That night, Cassie stayed up all night, worried about her husband. It wasn’t until the next morning that Kelley realized the gravity of the situation, when he had numerous friends looking for him as well.
“We had gotten in an argument, and we had one of those moments where I just was like, ‘I’m so sick of being told what to do,'” says the singer. “And I turned off my phone and I didn’t realize I had eight of my friends looking for me all night.”
It was that moment when Cassie gave her husband an ultimatum, one she was fully prepared to stand behind.
“The next morning, I said, ‘You need help. You have to deal with this,'” Cassie remembers. “And he said he knew, and he made a plan with his manager, and he flew directly from Greece to treatment. But at that point, I thought I was fully flying back to the US, and I was going to meet with a divorce attorney. That was it.”
Kelley, who released “As Far As You Could” late last year as a farewell letter to drinking, attended rehab for a month, but the work wasn’t his to do alone. His wife, whom he wed in 2009, recalls visiting him for a family weekend in rehab, when she realized how much work she had to do as well. For her, that realization was a bitter pill to swallow.
“I could have chosen to not do the work,” Cassie acknowledges. “But then I have to live with the way I’ve been affected, and unhealed. So whether Charles and I were in a marriage or not, whether I saw him again for the rest of my life, I still had to deal with what I had gone through.”
Lady A postponed their Request Line Tour last fall so Kelley could work on his sobriety. Now on the road, Kelley still attends a lot of recovery meetings, as well as therapy sessions with Scott and Haywood. He also breathes into a device twice a day to show both his wife and his bandmates that he is sober. After the challenges his drinking brought not only him but those closest to him, the 41-year-old is willing to do whatever it takes to mend the wounds his alcoholism caused.
“It makes me feel so grateful at how close I came to losing it all,” Kelley says. “I think the thing that’s hard is to know how much it affected Cassie the most, and my band, and the people around me, and how much it emotionally wrecked them for a while. I can’t really say I’m sorry enough. It’s just going to take time to rebuild that.”
Watch the entire interview here. Find all of Lady A’s music and upcoming shows at LadyAMusic.com.