Zach Bryan opens up about moment he chose to get sober... after the country star drank to ease stage fright

Zach Bryan is getting candid about his sobriety, more than one year after he quit drinking.

The 30-year-old country star – who recently performed in a 'Free Palestine' shirt – announced that he was two months sober in November 2025, and he says his life has dramatically improved since then.

'I just always thought sobriety was a joke,' Bryan said in a two-hour conversation with Matthew McConaughey posted to YouTube on Friday. 'I never realized I had a problem…'

Eventually, he had an epiphany after purchasing beer at 3am: 'That was the moment I realized... when I went and got that 40[oz], I was like, man, it's f***ing 3. You got an issue. Why do you want to drink a 40 right now in the Seattle Pilot parking lot?'

Elsewhere in the chat, Bryan said: 'Quitting drinking has been really great. I enjoy writing again. I feel this innocence I haven’t felt since I was like, 17. I feel like a kid again, ‘cause I wake up and I’m ready to go. I want to jump in the pond, I want to play with the dogs, I want to do everything.'

The music artist said he first turned to alcohol to ease his stage fright, and used to drink before and after performing. 

These days, the entertainer said he feels 'much better' hitting the stage without a drink.

Before getting sober, he also worried he wouldn’t be able to write music as well as he did with alcohol.

Bryan explained: 'Every hit I ever had, I was pretty much drunk when I made it. And so I had the issue of thinking I was never gonna have a good song if I wasn’t under the influence.'

His latest project, an EP called Young Manhood & Other Donatable Organs, came out on Friday.

The hitmaker said: 'This is the first project I’ve ever done that I didn’t drink a lick. I wrote every word sober and I sang every word sober. And I’ll say it took that to prove to me that I could do it. And I think the EP is pretty great.'

In November 2025, he revealed he quit drinking two months earlier, after a 20-day motorcycle trip that left him thinking: 'I really need some f***ing help.'

He had long been trailed by a 'bad boy' reputation that intensified in 2024 when he split from then-girlfriend Brianna 'Chickenfry' LaPaglia, who claimed he had been 'cheating on me the whole time' they were together.

A number of his songs have expressed inner turmoil, such as Oklahoma Son, in which he asks a woman: 'How'd you fall for a man I've grown to hate?'

But Bryan shocked fans when he tied the knot with Samantha Leonard late last year, after they met on a beach in Spain.

'I was living terribly, and I was drinking too much, and I was making all these bad decisions and all these things were going wrong,' he recalled.

'And it felt like as soon as I met Samantha, it changed, something, like a light switch,' he continued. 'When I told her I needed to stop [drinking], she quit that day. She was like, "Okay, whatever." Every single issue I had she made better… Samantha saved my life.'

On Sunday, he honored his wife with a social media post to mark her birthday.

The proud husband shared multiple photos of Leonard, including one of her holding a fish she caught.

He captioned the carousel, 'Happy birthday to my best friend and wife. My natural beauty, my paragliding, skydiving, Spanish cooking, gardening, roller coaster riding, empathetic, kind when it ain’t easy, hilarious, and selfless girl turns 29 today.'

Bryan gushed: 'You saved my life, Samantha. You showed me not only what love was but what support and friendship was. You n me always monchego. Can’t wait to give you gifts!!!!'