Shinedown frontman Brent Smith opened up about his long battle with addiction in a candid new interview. He spoke about how his bandmates helped save his life and how he continues to manage his sobriety to this day.
The interview also touched on the band’s new album EI8HT. Smith reflected on his darkest moments and the role his bandmates played in pulling him back from the edge. When asked how the band dealt with his addictions, Smith recalled a pivotal moment with bassist Barry Kerch.
“They saved my life. Without question. They never judged me,” Smith said. “I’ll never forget Barry looking at me at my lowest and him being like: ‘Dude, I’m not a cop. I’m not here to arrest you or take you in. I just don’t want to watch you die. Please, whatever I got to do, man, I’ll do it. Just don’t leave me. Don’t leave us. We have no idea why you’re torturing yourself like this, but please, you have to stop.'”
Smith went on to describe the turning point that made him realize he needed to change. He connected his sobriety to becoming a father and taking responsibility for his own choices.
“I’d just turned thirty, and that’s when I realized it was no longer about me,” he said. “Like, I’m no good to this child if I’m dead. We don’t know when it’s our time. I could have a freak accident, act of God, whatever. But I do have control of whether I’m gonna do that line, drink that bottle, smoke that rock. I do have a choice in regards to that. I can stop that.”
He also spoke about the lifestyle changes he made roughly a decade ago to sustain his performance on stage, including diet, nutrition, exercise, and even yoga.
“I’ll be transparent. I had to change my lifestyle about a decade ago, because I just wasn’t going to be able to keep up with the way I wanted to be on stage,” Smith said. “I did a lot of research about diet, nutrition, exercise, supplementation, all these different things where people are like: ‘Oh, it’s all hocus pocus.’ I just recently started doing yoga four days a week. Back in the day, people were like [rolls eyes]. But when you start getting older, the most crucial thing you need to be is flexible. You have to work that shit out, dude. You can’t be stagnant.”
Despite his progress, Smith was clear that sobriety is not a destination but a daily commitment. He described the internal struggle he still faces.
“Oh, he [that troubled individual] is with me every single day. I’m not talking about schizophrenia. But I am, and forever will be, an addict and an alcoholic,” he said. “He’s in here [taps head]. He’s very, very far in the back of my subconscious. But there are days I wake up that he can get loud, and I have to tell him: ‘Not today, man.’ That’s the only thing in my life that I have to do one day at a time. I have to remember: ‘I didn’t do drugs today, I didn’t drink today. But I have no idea what I’ll do tomorrow.’ So it’s never like: ‘I’m good. I can forget about it.’ Because at any given moment he could pick the lock and get out of the cage.”
Smith closed by reflecting on the band’s longevity and sharing a piece of advice that has stayed with him since his worst days of addiction.
“I’m not surprised we’ve made it to an eighth album, but I’m very grateful,” he said. “And there’s a statement I keep in the front of my mind. In my worst throes of addiction, I had a friend of mine tell me: ‘Dude, you focus on wanting to be this hardcore individual, on wanting to be punk-rock. But that other guy. He’s not trying to have fun with you, he’s trying to end you. And I’m telling you right now, man, when you’re clean, sober and locked in, that’s when you’re at your most dangerous.'”
The road to where Smith stands today was not a straight one. His sobriety story spans years of relapses, physical transformation, and hard-won clarity. All of it quietly shaped the music Shinedown has put out over the past decade.
Smith has been clean since March 2016. That milestone followed a significant relapse in 2014 that bled into the touring cycle for Threat to Survival. By his own account, that slip was one of the darkest periods of his life. The residual effects lingered long after he got clean again.
The physical toll of addiction had also been severe. At his lowest, Smith had become obese and was publicly mocked for his weight. He eventually traded substances for intense workouts and a strict clean diet, dropping nearly 70 pounds in the process. The motivation was straightforward: he wanted to be healthy for his son and for the fans who showed up night after night.
That commitment to sobriety carried directly into the studio. Shinedown’s 2018 album Attention Attention was the first record Smith wrote and recorded completely clean — no alcohol, no drugs, from the first note to the final tour date. Smith had long feared that getting sober would cost him his creative edge. He worried the darkness fueling his songwriting would disappear along with the substances. It didn’t.
“I was always afraid that I couldn’t write a record clean,” Smith admitted. That fear proved unfounded. Attention Attention became one of the band’s most critically recognized works. It was built entirely on the clarity sobriety gave him, rather than the chaos addiction once provided.
Shinedown’s eighth studio album, EI8HT, is now available.
