Chris Stapleton Discusses Being Sober in Country Music

Country star Chris Stapleton revealed he's been sober for several years in a new profile with GQ.

"I didn't have to go to rehab," said the singer. "But from a 45-year-old-man health perspective, a doctor's gonna look at me and go, 'Hey, man, probably cut out the drinking,' and I'd be like, 'OK, cool.'"

Though his pre-show ritual used to include a shot of tequila, the singer now runs through vocal exercises instead.

"I like to tell people that I got into a drinking contest with myself in my 20s, and I lost," Stapleton added.

In fact, the Grammy Award winner used to believe alcohol was just a part of the job, like a prerequisite to being a singer-songwriter.

"When you're younger, you feel like you have to do certain things in order to occupy some of these spaces, to make yourself feel like you're legit," he reflected. "You want to feel things. You want to be able to write about things authentically."

Today, he knows that's not the case.

"If somebody working a different kind of job drank themselves to death in the name of being better at that job, it wouldn't make sense to anybody," Stapleton noted. "We wouldn't say, 'Oh, he must have been the greatest electrician who ever lived.'"

The singer also shared that he's been going to therapy with his wife since 2020 as "a way to kind of help us navigate what the world was, what that meant to our family, to our business."

Stapleton's upcoming album Higher drops Nov. 10.