Macklemore “just wanted to escape” when he started taking sleeping pills again.
The Thrift Shop emcee had a big year in 2014, winning a Grammy for Best Rap Album with his breakthrough release The Heist. But when he retreated to his native Seattle to work on new material, the recovering addict started to slip back into some of his old ways.
“I held it together for a while. But, eventually, I stopped going to my 12-step meetings. I was burnt out. I was super-stressed. We weren’t sleeping — doing a show every day, zigzagging all over the country,” he explained to Complex magazine. “In terms of the media I was getting put into a box that I never saw for myself. The pressure and the fame — everything. All the clichés, man — like not being able to walk around, having no privacy, and from this TV appearance to this TV appearance, and the criticism, and the lack of connection, and the lack of meetings — all of that put into one pie was just…I just wanted to escape.”
The 32-year-old and his collaborator Ryan Lewis continued to work on music together. And even when his fiancée Tricia Davis found sleeping pills hidden in his shoes, he couldn’t bring himself to get straight once again.
“You know, like, Monday, I’ma stop…. OK. Tuesday, I’ma stop…. OK, f**k it, I might as well go on to the weekend. Sunday, I’m done. But after this bag of weed…,” he recalled how he bargained with himself, calling his actions “sneaky” and “deceitful.”
But when the couple found out they were expecting their first child together, it was all it took for the musician to turn his life around.
“I’ve been trying to grow up this year. Since I heard that Tricia was pregnant, I was like, ‘I need to grow up right now.’ The sobriety was the wake-up call that I needed.”
