Chris Stapleton is opening up about his relationship with alcohol.
The country singer, who is currently promoting a whiskey partnership, said in a Saturday article by Rolling Stone that he’s not a teetotaler, after a previous interview with GQ caused confusion among fans.
“I think the word ‘sober’ got used in an interview, and it’s probably a disservice to sober people to call me sober — certainly as we’re sitting here talking about drinking,” he clarified as he promoted a new beverage with Buffalo Trace Distillery.
“I don’t drink as much as I used to,” the singer told Rolling Stone. “I’m a 45-year-old man who has a lot more responsibilities and a lot less time for leisure than I used to have. But I do enjoy it. The first room you walk in at my house, there’s probably 200 bottles of bourbon there.”
In its interview last year, GQ had described Stapleton as “all but sober for several 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,’” Stapleton said at the time.
“I like to tell people that I got into a drinking contest with myself in my 20s, and I lost,” said the “Tennessee Whiskey” star. He then spoke about his connection to drinking as it related to his job as a songwriter and musician.
“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,” he told GQ.
“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.’”
Need help with substance use disorder or mental health issues? In the U.S., call 800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline.