Brent Smith recently admitted that he doubted his sober capabilities to create a record.

In an interview with Loudwire Nights, Smith confessed that although he tries to be as healthy as possible now, he wasn’t always that way. In fact, Attention Attention was the first album he was completely sober for.

“I never walked into the studio and cut my vocals inebriated, but on downtime, between tracking and writing and things like that, I started drinking again. The really tough thing about it was, I had gotten a prescription for benzos. These things are just massively deadly,” Smith said of the time before he became clean.

“I was always afraid that I couldn’t write a record clean, you gotta be messed up to write messed up stuff. But I didn’t need it.” Smith has now been clean since March 2016.

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