Just one More Reason to Jam to Everclear today....

From Everclear’s Art Alexakis Interviewed by Jonathon Freeman-Anderson, I added some emphasis:

How has working as a sober artist affected your life? What advice do you have for other artists struggling with sobriety? 

I have no problem talking about my sobriety. I have 24 years sober. My sobriety is older than my daughter is. There are other sober guys on the Summerland tour. We get together on the bus and check in.

Alcoholism is a disease and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of the fact that I can support my children and my wife. I fight my disease every day. I know it sounds like a cliché, but I go out there against this one day at a time. It’s really true. Even after 24 years, every day I want to go down into that hole. I fight it. It has been the hardest thing in my life.

My addictive personality has helped drive me into the guy that I am today. It wraps all of my success and failure into one and being grateful is what it is all about for me. I will wake up in the morning filled with this dark shitty cloud where I’ll just be down. Every day when I feel like that, I’ll make a list of all the things that I’m grateful for in my life. Once I get halfway down the list, I’ll realize, ‘what am I unhappy about?’ Really?

Everyone looks at me. They’re like, ‘wow, you’re doing this tour, and all this stuff,’ but they don’t know my problems. We all have problems. Even after I had success and money, I was miserable. I was much more miserable. Even though I wasn’t drinking or using drugs, I was feeding my addictive behavior with sex, power, and not being the guy that I needed to be. Inside, I was not being clean. I may have quit doing drugs, but my heart wasn’t clean.

Fighting this is a never-ending thing. It’s not just for a couple of years, but for the rest of my life. However, I can do something about my problem and with my life. I’m not just sitting around in a room doing drugs. Think about that. How crappy is that? I think about all the hours, days, and months that I spent in a room doing nothing but drugs with ugly people. We hadn’t brushed our teeth. I think, ‘what is sexy about that?’ What’s fun about that? That’s not fun.

I had my first child when I was 30 years old and that’s when I think my life really started. I got sober when I was 28. I had been clean for a few years, but I wasn’t sober. I started my sobriety on June 15, 1989. I wasn’t signed until I was 30. Success didn’t happen until I was 30!

People are going to tell you all sorts of crap. Don’t listen to them. Listen to you. Don’t ever give up. When people ask me if I can give them advice, I say, ‘no I really can’t give you specific advice except for the fact that if it is something that you really believe in, don’t give up.’ If you give up, someone else won’t. If you give up, you’ll never know. Also, that doesn’t mean that you can’t morph into something else. Maybe performing isn’t your thing, maybe it’s producing, or something else, but you cannot give up.