Zach Bryan is getting candid about his relationship with alcohol, revealing that he once drank as many as 15 beers a day and was intoxicated when he wrote nearly every hit song of his career.
The country star, 30, opened up about his sobriety during a conversation with Matthew McConaughey that was released alongside his latest EP, “Young Manhood and Other Donatable Organs.”
Bryan detailed how his drinking eventually led to severe panic attacks that left him fearing he was going to die.
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“When I got in the throes of drinking f—ing 15 beers in a day and I kept going with that cycle, I started getting these really, really severe panic attacks where my whole body went numb, and I thought I was going to have a stroke and die,” he told McConaughey.
“I’d curl up for days at a time, and I went to a doctor. And, like I said, I still didn’t believe it. I told the doctor, ‘Man, I’m just hungover. I’m fine.’ And the doctor was like, ‘No, man. You have a really severe thing going on here.’”
Bryan said his doctor diagnosed him with panic disorder and suggested that quitting alcohol could help.
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“[My doctor] said, ‘I think you have a pretty bad panic disorder. And if you quit drinking, that might help you a little bit.’ So I tried it, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’”
Before giving up alcohol, Bryan said he relied on drinking to manage his stage fright.
“So I used to get on stage. Here’s my routine. I used to think this was the perfect routine. No show could ever go bad if I did this: work out, shower, play my guitar, listen to Bon Iver, drink four beers,” he recalled.
“It eased my pain. All the stage fright I had was gone after I drank three or four beers, and I’m like, ‘I can do it.’ Then I would drink after the show, too.”
Bryan said he would wake up the next day facing another performance and repeat the same cycle.
“I’d wake up the next day with another show, and I’d think, ‘Well, to get rid of this panic in me, to get rid of this stage fright, there’s one choice. Let’s do what we’ve always done,’” he said. “I’d drink two or three more beers. And I thought I was never going to get out of that. I thought that cycle was forever.”
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The singer-songwriter said his managers had questioned whether he had tried performing without alcohol, but he viewed drinking as part of his routine.
“They would always be like, ‘Hey, have you tried not drinking before a show?’ Like, I can’t. It’s my routine. It’s my lucky socks,” Bryan said.
“For a long time, I danced with that. Years, I danced with that. And it worked, you know. I was playing a good show. I was paying my bills. I was doing everything. I employed 100 or 200 people. I was like, ‘This is fine.’”
Bryan said performing sober is more intimidating at first, but ultimately more rewarding.
“I will say now that I’ve quit drinking, stages are more scary,” he admitted. “But once I get on stage, it’s a lot more enjoyable. So much better. It feels like flying. It’s more fun. It’s the best feeling in the world.”
Bryan said the realization that he was responsible for his own struggles came after years of denial.
“I used to be so terrified of that,” he said of performing sober. “And that denial is what got me there. That denial is what brought me to those panic attacks. I was the issue the whole time.”
The Grammy winner also said he had convinced himself that alcohol was essential to his songwriting process.
“Every hit I ever had, I was pretty much drunk when I made it,” Bryan said. “And so I had the issue of thinking I was never going to have a good song again if I wasn’t under the influence.”
He described the belief as a “real curse” that made him feel as though he had to repeat the same rituals in order to create music.
“This is the first project I’ve ever done, this ‘Young Manhood’ thing, that I didn’t drink a lick,” he said. “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.”
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Bryan admitted that he once dismissed sobriety and didn’t recognize that his own drinking had become a problem.
“I always thought sobriety was a joke because it’s people who couldn’t control themselves celebrating not being able to control themselves,” Bryan said. “When I was drinking a lot, I always thought, ‘Why can’t you control yourself?’ I never realized I had a problem.”
The singer said his perspective changed during a solo 30-day motorcycle trip across the country.
Bryan said he spent much of the trip stopping at bars and drinking himself to sleep. When he reached a Pilot truck stop outside Seattle, he bought a 40-ounce Budweiser and sat on a curb beside his motorcycle.
“I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” he said. “I went into this Pilot and I grabbed a 40 [ounce bottle of] Budweiser, and I’m sitting on the curb with my motorcycle in front of me, and I’m drinking it. And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell was all that worth? Why did I do any of that? I feel emptier than when I left.’”
Bryan said he realized he had spent the previous 30 days chasing a “big romantic movie moment,” only to find himself alone in a parking lot.
“I’ve got nowhere to go home to, no one to call,” he recalled thinking. “That’s when I said, ‘Man, why am I drinking right now? What am I celebrating?’”
“It changed me a lot, that parking lot,” he said. “That was the moment I realized, when I went and got that 40, I was like, ‘Man, it’s f—ing 3. You’ve got an issue. Why do you want to drink a 40 right now in the Seattle Pilot parking lot?’”
Bryan previously announced in November 2025 that he had been sober for two months, writing that he had used alcohol to cope with a “perpetual discontent” and a “consistent black hole” inside him.
During his conversation with McConaughey, Bryan said sobriety has helped him feel more creative, energized and content.
“I feel great. I feel content. I feel whole,” he said. “There’s nothing I need to get me by anymore.”