When Jamey Johnson released his Midnight Gasoline album last year, it included a song called “Sober.” Written by Johnson, along with James Slater, the song says in part, “It ain’t easy on the wagon / Hell, I lost more of my mind than I have found / All these drinking songs we’re playing / Make it hard staying sober in this town.” It’s a message that Johnson now says wasn’t written for anyone as much as it was for himself.
“It was pointed more towards me than anybody else,” Johnson tells Saving Country Music. “I think that’s the whole perspective of being sober. You’re in charge of that vessel. I don’t know that it was as much a sermon to anybody as it was a confession from me. It’s hard. September will be 14 years without alcohol.”
When releasing “Sober,” Johnson admitted sobriety wasn’t easy for him.
“I haven’t had a drop of alcohol since 2011, and I know that could end this afternoon,” Johnson said at the time. “It is a day-to-day, hour-to-hour decision. Most of the places I play are bars, or I am still hanging out in bars. That’s where most of my friends are. Now I can hang out in them and not be drinking like I used to. That is what ‘Sober’ is about.”
Johnson no longer imbibes, but he does admit he will occasionally smoke pot, something he also cut out for several years.
“Every now and then, I may still break out a joint if I’m writing or something like that,” Johnson tells People. “But I don’t play games with the alcohol.”
“That’s what led me down a dark path of self-destruction back then and I barely survived,” he adds. “Alcohol was an incendiary way of destructing myself.”
Now happily married, Johnson concedes he may not have even survived had he kept drinking like he used to in the past.
“Everything just went up in flames, and you couldn’t put the fire out,” Johnon recalls. “You just had to wait for it to all come to ashes and then try to rebuild when you got done. And it seemed to me like I owed myself a better way to live than that.”
Midnight Gasoline might have never even happened if not for the loss of Toby Keith, who passed away in 2024 from stomach cancer.
“When Toby passed away, it moved everything into high gear because I realized that that was the end of his discography, that we weren’t getting another Toby Keith record,” Johnson reveals. “And that’s what drove me to wanting to finish my own discography.”
“It’s what made me understand that I’m nowhere near done, and so it’s time to get busy,” he adds. “After he passed away, I immediately started talking about this session and started trying to get all the particulars in order. It was time for me to get in the studio again.”
Find “Sober” and all of Johnson’s music and upcoming shows at JameyJohnson.com.
Photo Credit: David McClister