Zach Bryan Reflects on Nearly a Year of Sobriety and How It Changed His Life In A Conversation With Matthew McConaughey

Zach Bryan is offering a candid look at the moment that prompted him to completely change his relationship with alcohol and how choosing sobriety for the past year has changed both his personal life and music career for the better.

The country star recently sat down with Matthew McConaughey on a porch in the hills of Appalachia to celebrate the release of his new EP Young Manhood & Other Donatable Organs. During this conversation, which marks Bryan’s first public interview in years, the pair discussed music, God and life up to this point.

Sobriety has been a major turning point for Bryan over the past year. In November 2025, he took to social media to reveal that he had gone two months without alcohol and admitted how much better he already felt after making the change.

“I feel great. I feel content. I feel whole,” he wrote at the time. “There’s nothing I need to get me by anymore.”

Now, he’s opening up about what led to that drastic change in his life. Bryan tells McConaughey that he “never realized” he had a problem with drinking until he quit. It got to the point where the Oklahoma native was drinking around 15 beers a day, including before and after performances, just to try and calm his stage freight.

Bryan went on to explain that everything changed one night while out drinking at a New York City bar. He spontaneously decided to set off on a month-long motorcycle trip across the country. Inspired by his literary hero, Jack Kerouac, he hoped the journey would offer a chance for self-discovery and feel like a “soul journey.”

Somewhere along the way, he was hit with a strong realization that his life was headed in a bad direction. Instead of finding something great as part of this 30-day journey, he felt as if he had wasted his time and was left all alone at the end of it.

“I was stopping at all these bars and drinking myself to sleep,” he recalled. “I was at this Pilot truck stop right outside of Seattle. And I’ll never forget this as long as I live. I’m sitting on this curb and I go into this Pilot and I grab a 40 [ounce bottle of] Budweiser, and I’m sitting on the curb with my motorcycle in front of me and I’m drinking it. And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell was all that worth? Why’d I do any of that? I feel emptier than when I left. I’ve got nowhere to go home to, no one to call.’”

This moment promoted him to ask himself, “Why am I drinking right now? What am I celebrating?…Why do you want to drink a 40 right now in the Seattle Pilot parking lot?’”

He took a good hard look at himself in the mirror and realized that he had “an issue.” Bryan has since completely cut alcohol out of his life and while that has come with both ups and downs, he can proudly say that he is in a much better place because of it.

“I enjoy writing again. I feel this innocence I haven’t felt since I was like, 17. I feel like a kid again, ‘cause I wake up and I’m ready to go. I want to jump in the pond, I want to play with the dogs, I want to do everything,” he explained.

In the height of an incredibly difficult chapter in his life, Bryan met Samantha Leonard, on a beach in Spain. He recalled attending the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain together followed by a night of deep conversations that gave him yet another reason to make a big change.   

“The first night I met her, I can remember every single thing she was wearing, all the jewelry, everything she said to me…the next day I woke up, I looked at john my buddy, and I was like, ‘I’ve got to marry this woman.’”

He continued, “I was living terribly, and I was drinking too much, and I was making all these bad decisions and all these things were going wrong. And it felt like as soon as I met Samantha, it changed, something, like a light switch. When I told her I needed to stop [drinking], she quit that day. She was like, ‘Okay, whatever.’ Every single issue I had she made better. She made my life so much lighter. That’s how I knew… Samantha saved my life.”

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The pair returned to Spain and tied the knot on December 31, 2025 in the place they first met, surrounded by a close group of friends.

One of Bryan’s biggest concerns about getting sober was learning to take the stage without relying on the liquid courage. He also found himself questioning whether he could continue writing hit songs without being under the influence.

Fortunately, neither challenge has been as difficult as Bryan once anticipated. He shared that performing sober now feels “much better,” and he was able to create an entire EP without alcohol, a project he now considers to be “pretty great.”

“This [EP] is the first project I’ve ever done that I didn’t drink a lick. I wrote every word sober and I sang every word sober. And I’ll say it took that to prove to me that I could do it.”

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Young Manhood & Other Donatable Organs arrived Oct. 16, 2026 EP and features guest appearances by Lana Del Rey and Turnpike Troubadours.

Zach Bryan will bring the project to life throughout his recently announced the YM&ODO tour, taking place across the U.S., Canada, and Australia in 2027.