Brantley Gilbert has been sober since 2011, but he might not be, if not for  Keith Urban. It’s Urban who quietly encouraged Gilbert that he could be an artist without alcohol, when Gilbert was still in treatment for his addiction.

“I will say that Keith Urban became a friend of mine in a time when I was making a transition in life,” Gilbert says. “I honestly don’t know if I’d be sitting in this room if it weren’t for that man, and him taking time out of his life to come talk to me. It was a time when I’d stopped drinking and stopped doing some other things, and was just kind of unsure about moving forward. And he, again, took time out of his life and talked to me, and I’ll never forget that as long as I live. So that just wasn’t in music, it was in life.”

This isn’t the first time Gilbert has publicly praised Urban. In an earlier interview, the father of three recalls the pivotal visit Urban gave to Gilbert, while Gilbert was receiving treatment at Cumberland Heights, a drug and alcohol rehab center in Nashville.

“It was definitely a life-changing thing,” Gilbert recalls on the Bussin’ With The Boys’ podcast. “It was crazy. I went in, Keith Urban showed up when I was in there, on a whim one day. I’ve told this story a bunch, but he sat down and had a conversation with me. I don’t know if I’d be playing music right now had it not been for that conversation with that man. So that was pretty cool.”

For Gilbert, performing while drinking was all he ever knew. It took Urban to convince Gilbert that he could not only perform while sober, but it would be better than ever before.

“The day I got out, my record label president and my manager picked me up at the rehab facility and took me straight to the tour bus. I went on on the Eric Church Blood, Sweat and Beers Tour in 2012,” the “Over When We’re Sober” singer recounts.

“I’ve been uncomfortable on stage several times in my life, but then I literally felt out of my skin,” he remembers. “I felt like I was butt-naked, in front of thousands of people every night. The good thing was, my conversation with Keith, he told me that. He was like, ‘You’re gonna feel like you’re out of your skin up there. It’s never gonna be what it was. But it will be better.’”

Now that Gilbert has quit drinking, he is grateful that he cut alcohol out of his life. For him, he knows there is no way he could ever pick it up again.

“I’m a guy that says if I say I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it or die trying,” Gilbert says on Today’s Country Radio with Kelleigh Bannen.” “And with alcohol, it got to a point with it where I knew it was something I needed to change and cut back on. I said, ‘You know what? This has a little more control over me than I like, and I just need to get it out of my life,’ and couldn’t do it. Physically. That really frustrated me. Going in and being open to a different route of not being able to do it by myself was kind of humiliating and almost embarrassing to an extent, for about a split second. And then the thought was, ‘Dude, get it out of your life.’”

Find all of Gilbert’s music and upcoming shows at  BrantleyGilbert.com.