Zach Bryan on sobriety: ‘I feel like a kid again’

Home latest pakistan world sports showbiz entertainment Royal business health Sci-Tech Food Fact Check Sci-Tech Videos shows Watch –> Entertainment Zach Bryan on sobriety: ‘I feel like a kid again’ Zach Bryan tells Matthew McConaughey a truck stop in Seattle changed everything By Web Desk | Published October 20, 2026

Zach Bryan says he never realised he had a problem with alcohol until a month-long motorcycle trip showed him otherwise.

The 30-year-old country star opened up about his sobriety in a two-hour conversation with Matthew McConaughey, nearly a year after he first said he had quit drinking.

“I always thought sobriety was a joke,” Bryan said, because he saw it as people celebrating not being able to control themselves.

Read more: Zach Bryan shares personal memoir plans amid new tour dates

“When I was drinking a lot, I thought, ‘Why can’t you control yourself?’ I never realised I had a problem.”

He said he left New York on his motorcycle after a night at a West Village bar, expecting what he called “some sort of soul journey” in the vein of his hero Jack Kerouac.

He stopped at national parks and bars along the way. “I was stopping at all these bars and drinking myself to sleep,” he said.

The turning point came in a truck stop parking lot in Seattle.

“Why am I drinking right now? What am I celebrating?” he asked himself. He realised he had “wasted 30 days” chasing a big romantic moment and was simply alone.

Bryan had feared his songwriting would suffer without alcohol, but says the opposite happened.

“Quitting drinking has been really great,” he said. “I enjoy writing again… I feel like a kid again.”

He wrote every song on his new eight-song EP, Young Manhood and Other Donatable Organs, while sober.

Friends told him he was funnier, though weddings are the hardest occasions for him.

Shortly after getting sober, he married Samantha Leonard, whom he met on a beach in Spain.

When he told her he needed to stop drinking, he said, she quit that day too. He announced in November 2025 that he was two months sober.

Read more: Zach Bryan expresses pride over ‘two months’ sobriety