Far Out 40: The best songs about getting sober
For as long as there has been alcohol, there have been drinking songs, whether they are strummed around a campfire or belted out by ageing rock stars in colossal stadiums. An avenue of the musical realm which isn’t often discussed, however, is the overwhelming volume of songs detailing the perils of addiction or soundtracking sobriety.
“If you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favour,” once declared the late prophet Bill Hicks. “Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them.”
While it is certainly true that drugs have routinely been used as a means of musical inspiration over the years, spurring on everything from The Beatles’ LSD-infused psychedelic explorations to the amphetamine-fueled garage rock of Iggy Pop and The Stooges, it is also true that drugs and alcohol have seen many of Earth’s greatest artists fall irreversibly into the depths of addiction.
Addiction appears to have been the leading cause of death among musicians for many years, claiming – directly or not – countless lives, from Hendrix to Winehouse and everybody in between. Inevitably, then, there is an endless array of songs in which artists write frankly about their addictions and, in some cases, recoveries. Similarly, countless artists have used their material to try and dissuade audiences from going down that same path.
Here, we have collated 40 examples of artists either chronicling their own horrifying anecdotes about drink and drugs, espousing the joys of sobriety, or simply denouncing those mind-altering substances altogether. Rather tellingly, these choices span a litany of different genres, from the ska sounds of Gregory Isaacs, who struggled for many years with an addiction to crack cocaine, to the hardcore mastery of Minor Threat.
Ian MacKaye’s pioneering outfit, in fact, is responsible for birthing the entirety of the ‘straight edge’ punk movement, even if the songwriter himself has since denounced that scene on a multitude of occasions.
Given that the punk movement was so often linked to substance abuse, though, Minor Threat’s stance on the matter was as essential as it was trailblazing, and they are joined on this list by various fellow punks, in the form of Descendents, The Clash, and folk-punk heroes AJJ, who each have their own respective tracks about addiction.
Some of the most gut-wrenching anti-drug anthems arose from the 1970s, when, in the wake of the counterculture years, artists began to look around and see their comrades succumbing to addiction. Neil Young, for instance, wrote the definitive anti-drug song ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’ about Danny Whitten, who would die of an overdose in the same year of the song’s release.
Even John Lennon, who Bill Hicks referenced in that original quote, wrote about his own battle with heroin addiction and ‘Cold Turkey’ specifically deals with the journey of overcoming that addiction. Similarly, George Harrison’s ‘Just for Today’ is a kind of ode to the various friends and fellow musicians that had been lost to addiction, most pertinently his friend Eric Clapton, who came very close to succumbing to his addiction entirely.
It should go without saying that these songs of sobriety are, more often than not, utterly heartbreaking in their exploration of addiction and abuse, but there are also more than a few moments of hope over the course of this playlist that addiction can be overcome.
The best songs about getting sober:
- Neil Young – ‘Needle and the Damage Done’
- Minor Threat – ‘Straight Edge’
- John Lennon – ‘Cold Turkey’
- Tom Waits – ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking’
- Johnny Cash – ‘Cocaine Blues’
- Kris Kristofferson – ‘Sunday Morning Comin’ Down’
- The Kinks – ‘Alcohol’
- Elvis Costello – ‘The Big Light’
- The Who – ‘I’ve Had Enough’
- The Specials – ‘Stereotype’
- BC Camplight – ‘A Sober Conversation’
- Steel Pulse – ‘Man No Sober’
- Florence and the Machine – ‘Ship to Wreck’
- George Harrison – ‘Just for Today’
- Gil Scott-Heron – ‘The Bottle’
- Minor Threat – ‘Out of Step’
- Echo and the Bunnymen – ‘Do It Clean’
- John Prine – ‘Sam Stone’
- Nina Simone – ‘Lilac Wine’
- Sufjan Stevens – ‘I Want To Be Well’
- Blur – ‘Coffee and TV’
- Bill Ryder-Jones – ‘I Hold Something In My Hand’
- De La Soul – ‘My Brother’s A Basehead’
- Alice In Chains – ‘Nutshell’
- Frightened Rabbit – ‘I Wish I Was Sober’
- Frank Turner – ‘Recovery’
- Idles – ‘The Wheel’
- AJJ – ‘Small Red Boy’
- Public Enemy – ‘Night of the Living Baseheads’
- The Clash – ‘Hateful’
- Descendents – ‘Bikeage’
- Joe Walsh – ‘One Day At A Time’
- Curtis Mayfield – ‘Freddie’s Dead’
- Steppenwolf – ‘The Pusher’
- Gregory Isaacs – ‘Hard Drugs’
- Lou Reed – ‘Underneath The Bottle’
- The Rolling Stones – ‘Mother’s Little Helper’
- Thin Lizzy – ‘Got To Give It Up’
- Red Hot Chili Peppers – ‘Under the Bridge’
- Paul Revere and the Raiders – ‘Kicks’
