There was a time when Brantley Gilbert needed booze and pills to get through the day.
He carried around a laptop case filled with bottles of alcohol so he’d always have a fix within arm’s reach. That all changed on December 18th, 2011 — the day he had his last drink.
Brantley tells People that he struggled in rehab until Keith Urban paid him a visit. “I remember him telling me, ‘Hey man, it’s gonna be scary, it’s gonna freak you out, but it’s gonna be beautiful.’ That was the opposite of the way I felt, and it that gave me that extra kick to go, ‘I can do this.’”
Looking back for him though is a very real and hard thing. “Knowing where I am now, looking back almost makes me sick to my stomach,” he says. “To go back to that frame of mind now is hard. Just what the hell was I thinking?”
Now Brantley says he celebrates his sober birthday more often than the day he was born.
“I celebrate my sober birthday more than I do my birthday birthday. That was December 18th. Pretty cool. I should say clean birthday, because I’m a Willie Nelson fan. But alcohol-free.”
