Chris Stapleton Reveals He Didn't Need Rehab to Get Sober, Claims He 'Got Into a Drinking Contest' With Himself and 'Lost'

Chris Stapleton didn’t need rehab to get on the straight and narrow!

In a recent interview, the country singer opened up about his journey to sobriety after struggling with alcohol abuse for many years.

"I didn’t have to go to rehab, 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, ‘Okay, cool,'" he explained.

The star’s pre-show preparation used to start with a shot of tequila, however, after being sober for many years, it now starts with some vocal exercises.

"I like to tell people that I got into a drinking contest with myself in my 20s, and I lost," he confessed. "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. You want to feel things. You want to be able to write about things authentically."

Speaking further on the stigma that musical artists write better songs when they are struggling with addiction, Stapleton said, "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. We wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, he must have been the greatest electrician who ever lived.’"

Not only did Stapleton address his substance abuse, he also explained how he and his wife, Morgane, got through their issues with the help of therapy.

"It was a way to kind of help us navigate what the world was, what that meant to our family, to our business," he said about the experience, while raving about his lover, who he said was the "barometer on songs."

"Even if your wife wasn’t heavily involved in your career, if you’re happily married and you want to stay that way, you don’t want to sing things that your wife hates," he noted.

In the interview, Stapleton also touched on the fact that he was not always interested in music.

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He explained that in high school he played football, baseball and basketball, was valedictorian and later chose to study engineering in college. However, once he arrived at Vanderbilt, in Nashville, Tenn., he was enthralled by the country music hub.

“The notion of writing songs was not foreign to me. What was foreign to me was learning that when George Strait sang a song, he didn’t necessarily write it,” he said. “When I found out that there was this golden job where someone would pay you to sit in a room and make up songs…I thought, Man, that’s the greatest job in the world.”

GQ interviewed Stapleton about his past struggles with alcohol use.