Jamey Johnson is proudly sober, mostly. The Grand Ole Opry member hasn’t had a drink in more than 13 years, although he admits on a rare occasion he still enjoys a little marijuana, albeit rarely.
“I had my last drink in September 2011,” Johnson tells Billboard. “Then I quit smoking pot in 2015. I think that lasted about eight years, nine years. In that time period, it was all about sobriety. And with a sober mind, I’m able to do things like get a pilot’s license, manage a business, start a product line. I’m sober for the most part, but every now and then, I may still break out a joint if I’m writing or something like that.”
Johnson isn’t opposed to smoking pot, but he says he will never, ever have a drink again, after realizing the negative impact it had on him
“But I don’t play games with the alcohol,” Johnson maintains. “That’s what led me down a dark path of self-destruction back then and I barely survived. Alcohol was an incendiary way of destructing myself. Everything just went up in flames and you couldn’t put the fire out, you just had to wait for it to all come to ashes and then try to rebuild when you got done. And it seemed to me like I owed myself a better way to live than that.”
Johnson’s new album, Midnight Gasoline — his first in 14 years — will be out on Friday, November 8. The 49-year-old wrote most, but not all, of the songs on the record, insisting that he is a songwriter before he is anything else.
“Giving it my best is how I honor the calling,” Johnson explains. “At the end, I don’t have to worry about how it’s being used. That’s up to God. Somebody’s going to hear that song that I would have never known existed and that this person would have never known that I existed except for the fact that my song reached them.
“When they come looking for me, they want to share that experience and they want to tell me all about it, but what they really want to do is connect with God and say, ‘God, I got the song you sent me through this bearded weirdo over here,'” he adds.
See a track list for Midnight Gasoline below. Find all of Johnson’s music and upcoming shows at JameyJohnson.com.
Track List for Midnight Gasoline:
1. “Bad Guy” (Jamey Johnson and Dale Dodson)
2. “Midnight Gasoline” (Scotty Emerick, Dean Dillon and Jeff Hyde)
3. “What a View” (Jamey Johnson, Randy Houser, Rob Hatch and Dallas Davidson)
4. “21 Guns” (Jamey Johnson and Jim “Moose” Brown)
5. “Someday When I’m Old” (Aimee Mayo, Chris Lindsey and Troy Verges)
6. “Trudy” featuring Randy Houser (Charlie Daniels)
7. “One More Time” (Jamey Johnson, Ernest Keith Smith and Rob Hatch)
8. “Saturday Night in New Orleans” (Jamey Johnson, Chris Stapleton and Tony Joe White)
9. “Sober” (Jamey Johnson and James Slater)
10. “I’m Tired of It All” (Dallas Davidson and Kyle Fishman)
11. “No Time Like the Past” (Jamey Johnson and Chris Stapleton)
12. “What Do You Answer To” (Jamey Johnson, Ira Dean, Ajay Popoff and Jeremy Popoff)