Brantley Gilbert Opens Up About the Health Scare That Led Him to Get Sober 14 Years Ago

Brantley Gilbert has been sober for 14 years. While a lot has changed since he made that decision, he’ll never forget the moment that inspired him to turn his life around.

The country rocker appeared on a recent episode of Tracy Lawrence’s Road House podcast, where he explained how his drinking had reached a dangerous point before he made the decision to get sober. Gilbert opened up about the toll the addiction was taking on his health, revealing that his struggles had become more than just a bad habit, they had become a serious medical concern too.

“You got to know leading into this, it was becoming a health thing. It was becoming a medical thing. Pancreatitis, liver, kidneys were shot in my early 20s. And so it got bad. It wasn’t that I didn’t know there was a problem…Two liters a day. Every 24 hours. Just vodka the first part of the day and then bourbon or Jäger to end the day. And honestly, if you didn’t know me well, you wouldn’t have known I tore up. It becomes a cruising altitude.”

The night his hit song “Country Must Be Country Wide” reached No. 1 should have been a moment of pure celebration. But as Gilbert was out on the road marking the career milestone with his team and a cake on the bus, he says an unexpected feeling of guilt began to creep in.

“I was hearing from everybody, ‘Man, you really need to just take a moment and appreciate this, smell the roses.’ And I’m terrible about that and I don’t do it anymore. But I went to the back of the bus and it was supposed to be my moment to kind of soak it all in. And I cracked the window and looked out. And for whatever reason, I just looked at the table the cake was on and I was like, ‘Man, there are people that have gone broke and homeless and destroyed their lives and their marriages and their relationships for a chance just to get on the radio, not to have the top song in the country. And we’re doing the same s**t we do every night. There’s just a cake here tonight.’”

Gilbert suddenly felt like he was taking all the success and blessings he had received for granted. While he wasn’t a husband or a father yet at the time, he wanted to give himself the opportunity to become a better version of himself.

“I just felt like I owed it to myself and my mom and the people around me that loved and cared about me to, ‘Hey dude, get it out of your life for a minute and see what happens. If you go back down that road, it is what it is but get out of your life and see if anything changes up here in here.’ And I called my manager, told him I needed a hole in my schedule and I didn’t have to tell him. He knew.””

So, on December 18, 2011, Brantley Gilbert checked himself into a facility.

“The next five days were five of the most miserable days of my life, man. I crawled to the shower and back to the bed in that room. I didn’t get released from medical until day six or day seven. And I left 11 days in to go on the Eric Church Blood, Sweat and Beers Tour. And I was still at risk for after my seizures and all that stuff. So I had to bring a guy out. But that was my first tour with my own boss.”

While still in recovery, he crossed paths with Keith Urban and remembers feeling shame in that moment.

“I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ Trying to hide my head and didn’t want him to see me. And he turned around and saw me. He goes, ‘Brantley, can I talk to you for a minute?’ And I was like, ‘God, I’m hiding.’ I didn’t want to talk to anybody, man. Even Keith Urban. I just wanted to be miserable and do my time.”

An unexpected conversation came from this interaction that found them swapping stories of their struggles and had Urban asking Gilbert, “What are you afraid of?” Gilbert’s first instanct was to say that he wasn’t afraid of anything, but the Australian country star encouraged him to dig deeper and speak openly.

“He said, ‘No, really? What are you afraid of?’ And almost immediately doing my job. I’m terrified to do my job. I don’t remember what it’s like to play a show sober,” he admitted. “It’s like alcohol for me wasn’t, man, I’m going to drink, have a good time tonight.”

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The drinking had quickly became a coping mechanism for Georgia native. He says he drank or used every chance he got and the partying reached an entirely new level once music became his full-time gig.

“You take an interview at 8:00 in the morning, you got your bottle of orange juice full of vodka. Who’s going to tell you something different…I’m going to do what the hell I want to do. So man, years of that, it was never a drink, have a good time. Man, it was not just a coping mechanism it was self-destructive, but it was medicine, man.”

Lawrence then opened up about his own struggles with alcohol and revealed that in order to get to a place where drinking wasn’t controlling his life, he had to get to the root of the problem.

“When I finally went through the process and I went to a treatment facility for a while, the one thing that, and I don’t know what your process was, but the counselor, he put this big piece of white paper up on the wall and he drew a line right in the middle of it. And we went back to my earliest memories and we started doing the positive and the negative impact of what that was. And we drew that whole map out all the way up to the current point of my life.”

Lawrence continued, “Went back through those things of regression and pain and childhood trauma and all those things. And it was awful, absolutely freaking awful. But being able to get through that whole thing and start to put some things in perspective as I’d gotten to a point in my life that I didn’t even realize what I was running from anymore.”

Brantley Gilbert emphasized that everyone’s journey with addiction is different, but sharing personal experiences can help others feel less alone. He believes stories of overcoming struggles have the power to connect people and offer hope to those facing similar battles.

“I’ll never tell anybody I know where they’re at because we’re always different with our fingerprints. And I feel like our addictions are the same…just communicating with somebody that’s in that place we know how to speak that language. We recognize each other. I can walk in a room in five minutes and tell you if it’s somebody that’s dealt with serious trauma or substance abuse.”