photo: Bill Kelly

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“I am on the constant search for connectivity and I do what I can do to remind people of their humanity,” My Morning Jacket drummer Patrick Hallahan explains, while describing the nature of his relationship with the group’s fanbase. “Live music is one of the last fronts of bringing people together, no matter their background, so they can just be people for a moment.”

As he considers the ways that he has manifested this goal as of late, including directly enlisting community members to suggest their favorite local restaurants and cultural destinations while he’s on tour, Hallahan shares a personal reflection. “That clarity came from not clouding my brain with substances that were dragging me down,” he says. “That’s one of the billion things that kind of popped out the minute I took the fog away.”

Indeed, January 11 marked the fifth anniversary of Hallahan’s commitment to sobriety. While anyone’s path to this decision comes with personal pitfalls and impediments, Hallahan’s journey has been complicated by his roles as a musician who also works in the food service industry.

Dry January calls to mind the challenges of pursuing sobriety in social spaces that are not necessarily conducive to such efforts. Along these lines, My Morning Jacket has partnered with 1 Million Strong, an organization that defines its mission as “working to transform the way society thinks about mental health and recovery by building sober-supportive communities and a culture of wellness within the music world and beyond.”

Hallahan muses on his approach to all of these matters during the following conversation, which took place on January 9—two days prior to his five year mark, and a day before the passing of Bob Weir, whose creative spirit is one of many subjects that Hallahan discusses with deep contemplation and candor.

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What initially prompted you to ask folks to recommend restaurants and other places of potential interest in anticipation of your tour stops?

One of my favorite parts about touring is the adventure. The two and a half hours we have on stage is the tip of a very big iceberg and there’s a lot of downtime. By week three into a tour, you start to miss home. You start to feel the rigor of traveling in a circus every day. So years ago, I just decided, “Okay, every city I go to, I’m going to find something to eat. I’m going to find a museum. I’m going to find a park. I’m going to find a record store. I’m going to find something to get me out of my hotel room. I’m going to find something to get me out of the backstage area of a venue and just explore—to really get to know a city.” The end result was I could empathize with the people in the audience that night.

I could feel who they were by getting to know them—talking to people at a coffee shop or just meeting someone on the street. It got me in the mood to find out more.

I started out being the guy in the band that knew restaurants. I’ve been befriending chefs for a long time. The culinary arts are as important to me as music. They’re one and the same with me, so I have a lot of chef friends.

I would compile a list of just where to go in each city. I’m the guy in the band booking the dinners well in advance. When we have a day off, they’re always asking me, “Okay, where are we going?”

So I just started thinking that it would be an amazing way to connect with people, with our fan base, if I asked them, “Where am I going? What am I doing? What am I eating? Tell me about your town.”

I also thought that I could help drive energy to these independent businesses. It’s high risk out there. So anything that I could do to help increase awareness of these record stores and coffee shops became a mission for me.

When you’re visiting these locations yourself, will you run into people who are there at your suggestion?

Yes, that does happen and it’s awesome. I love it when they come up to me and let me know why they’re there.

I also really enjoy it when the restaurant owner sees that the community has arrived.

I respect entrepreneurs so much. It’s such a tough world out there. So I wanted to shine some light on these places. I do it on Instagram and Facebook where it lives in perpetuity and people can go back and use it as a reference.

Honestly, the idea for all of this came out of the changes that I made in my life once I wasn’t as cloudy.

Can you talk about your initial decision to refrain from alcohol and how you put that into practice?

Every year I would take a month off in January, before it was called Dry January. I would stumble through the holidays, quite literally sometimes, and I just needed a break. So I would give my body a month-long break and then I’d go back.

I would also take off a month after the Kentucky Derby because St. Patrick’s Day, my birthday, and Kentucky Derby would happen, and they were all very much interwoven with alcohol. There was I moment when I realized how many pieces of my life were connected with alcohol in some way, shape, or form. Not always overuse, it was just that my family culture revolved around a clink. There were lots of cheers at celebrations, funerals, birthdays and births.

So I would take those months off and then find myself getting pulled back into the fray. Honestly, I’d been wanting to call it quits for a while because it was starting to affect a lot of things. I was getting terrible hangovers. I was planning my week around being hungover, and it was starting to affect my relationship with my wife.

She saved my life in so many ways, but she sat me down on our screened-in porch one day. Then she pulled up another chair, she looked at me and she was just like, “I love you so much and I’m with you forever.” Then she turned to the chair and said, “Now Patrick’s alcohol abuse, I do not love you. You are an unwelcome roommate in this house and you are dictating a lot of how things are going down around here.”

I burst into tears and really thought to myself, “God, I’m not just affecting me.” I had already been thinking, “I need to quit because this doesn’t feel right and I want to do all these things, but I’m always hungover and can’t quite get there.”

So I did a cooking show over the pandemic and that’s when I knew I was going to have my last drink.

My five-year anniversary is coming up on January 11^th. The 10th was the final day of shooting and we had a little wrap party. I had a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of champagne and in the back of my mind, I was like, “This is it. This is the last time I’m doing this. ” Then I woke up completely hungover and I was like, “Okay, this is definitely it.”

For a while it seemed like you were somewhat reticent about publicly sharing your story. At what point did your perspective change on this?

It was a private thing for me for a while, but not because I was ashamed of it. I just didn’t want to be on my soapbox yelling at people because what does that do? All it does is alienate.

I also have a lot of friends who are winemakers and master distillers. This is part of their craft and I don’t speak down upon alcohol in any way, shape or form. This is just me.

So I wanted to make peace with this new discovery and also kind of understand it. I didn’t want to speak flippantly about something that I didn’t quite grasp yet. I knew I wanted to do it, but I didn’t know what was going to be exposed. So it took me three years, at which point somebody kind of suggested, “You should say something about this. You’ve been doing this quietly for a long time and quietly supporting.”

My phone is always on for people in similar situations, but I didn’t get on a public platform to say anything like that until somebody pointed out, “You talking about it might help somebody make better choice for themselves.”

That was all it took. I still don’t talk about it that much. I don’t want to be preachy about it, but I do want to talk about my story every once in a while because I do feel like sometimes that’s all it takes.

I also saw some people who did it before me. I saw the clarity they were getting and seeing their step across the line was enough for me to be like, “Okay, let’s try this out. ” It does dramatically change your relationships with people at first. Some people go away because that was your connection, but it doesn’t change anything for the people who love you. It’s so beautiful. In fact, it allows for that love to grow and to blossom and to become deeper and more meaningful.

You don’t have this fog that takes over in the latter parts of the evening when everybody’s gone too far. So I had to understand what it meant to stop, what it meant to me, how it affected me and what were the benefits.

I really wrapped my head around it, and it took about three years for me to get the courage to say something about it. I was like, “Okay, I can talk about this and I know what I’m talking about now.”

As a touring musician and someone involved in the hospitality industry, it seems like there would be an additional level of difficulty in achieving and maintain sobriety. Did you experience it that way?

You’re right that a lot of the people who fall into this trap are not only surrounded by it, but they’re celebrated for doing it. There’s so much iconography of Jimmy Page throwing back a bottle of Jack Daniels. It’s part of the lore.

The restaurant and the food and beverage industry is also coated in it because it’s part of the pageantry, it’s part of the flavor, it’s part of the dining ritual.

It’s really difficult to imagine life without that piece of the puzzle for a lot of people. It was for me. I was like, “How am I going to go out? How am I going to sit down to a long table dinner and when everybody raises their glass of wine to cheers, what do I do?”

I went to a dinner party and it was a Georgian Supra. The wife of a friend is from the Republic of Georgia and they have 11 toasts before the meal is even served. It was my first step into that realm and I really had to take a moment and think, “Okay, what do I do now when this happens?” Honestly, it just comes down to “Does it feel better for you not to do it?” If the answer is yes to that, then the next set of questions are kind of pointed around “Is it worth it to keep doing that?”

So when I’m around alcohol, I don’t have a temptation anymore because I know that it makes me feel terrible. I also know that the late night conversations mean more because I remember everything in the morning and that the relationships are more based on reality than they are this fictitious state that we’re in when we’re under the influence of alcohol.

So I guess what I would say to somebody in that situation is, if you feel better and you work better, the music that you make is better, the service that you provide in your restaurants is better, you’re a better boss, you’re a better employee, you’re a better partner, you’re a better friend, you’re a better son, daughter, sibling, then why wouldn’t you continue doing it?

I really support anyone in that state where it’s negatively affecting their life. Even in the high-pressure industries, I’m just cheering for them to find that peace and that clarity because it’s liberating. It’s true liberation in every true sense of the work.

In the interest of helping some other folks in similar situations, do you have a standard response when a well-wisher sees you out there in the world—whether it’s backstage at an MMJ show or perhaps at your Sparkle Ball event in Louisville—then puts their arm around you in an affectionate manner and offers you a glass of bourbon?

Oh, it’s so easy. I just ask for a hug instead. It’s that simple. It’s like, “You know what? I don’t drink anymore, but come here.” Boom! I think that’s even more meaningful.

I can’t tell how many drinks I had to turn down the first year. It took people a long time to disassociate me from that. People were like, “Wait, what? When did you stop drinking?” I’m sure in the Louisville, Kentucky bar scene everybody was like, “Why do we have all this inventory?” [Laughs.]

But it just became an easy moment and I just would turn it into something more meaningful than a drink because a drink really just means, “Hey, I’m thinking about you. ” So flip the script. How else can we be thinking about each other? What’s a gesture that we can do that says the same thing, but doesn’t end up in a hangover or a bad decision? A hug was the quick fix for me.

That does effectively and efficiently convey the sentiment.

Yes, it’s the intention behind the gesture.

Jumping back to the experience of going city to city asking folks “Where to go, what to do, what to eat,” can you share some of your favorite discoveries from the past year?

I won’t mention any places specifically because I don’t want to play favorites. Let me say, though, I already loved Milwaukee, but I felt like I got in deep with Milwaukee this last time. The same is true of Austin and a lot of other cities.

So it’s not the discoveries in cities that I didn’t know about, it was getting out of my rut in cities like Austin, New York, San Francisco and LA. Rather than going to the same places, I would try all these other ones based on recommendations. It was truly amazing. From taquerias to these little antique shops. I couldn’t post all of them because the platform has time limitations, so I picked three for each town. Sometimes, given the logistics, I couldn’t go to those three but if I couldn’t make one of them, I went to another one on the list.

This whole experience just reminds me that it enriches life when you take a chance on people, when you put a little flare out there and let them respond. It helps build community, and at a time when we’re getting so far away from that, I’m doing everything in my power to change that, to flip that script, because we are so much better together. It’s true.

That brings to mind a quote from Jeff Tweedy’s latest last book, in which he writes, “Creating connection through music is my life’s work.”

Tweedy’s crushing it, by the way. I just talked to him when they came through Louisville. I’ve loved the Wilco guys for years. There’s such sweet people and innovative, over-the-top musicians. God, they’re so good.

I’ve also seen Jeff go through all of his stuff. They asked us to come on the road with them when he had just come out of recovery and he was really dealing with his new truth, his new life. Their last show was in Louisville and we opened for them. This was years ago, and he broke down crying in front of the crowd talking about it all.

To see where he is now—he’s in good shape, his voice has never sounded better, he’s in a great mood. I really champion his path because it seems to have ended up in a place that makes a better Jeff. That’s what we all strive to do—to be the best version of ourselves we can.

Returning again to your road recommendations, in the context of mental health struggles I imagine it’s beneficial to get out of one’s rut and explore a new environment.

A lot of the aspects of mental health go back to feeling alone. So it’s good to be reminded that you’re not alone and that you’re on this crazy rock together with a bunch of other people. I think that getting out, getting fresh air, getting sunlight, getting exercise, those are the first easy steps to a path to mental wellness. Those are free and they’re right there in front of you.

It can be a tough step sometimes because you’re tired on the road. I use the third week as a benchmark moment in most tours because it is for a lot of bands. It can be hard to get the motivation to get out and do something, but you’re reminded of all the beautiful things in life. So you can clear the voices out of your head and kind of straighten yourself out just by being in humanity or being in nature or being surrounded by art in a museum or just running into a stray cat on the street and having a moment with that.

It’s all about making an effort to get out and remind yourself that you’re not in this pit alone.

Honestly, the mental health of our band is at an all-time high. Everybody’s had their own journey and we don’t even have alcohol on the rider anymore. That wasn’t by somebody saying, “I can’t have that on the rider,” it just became something.  

Tom [Blankenship] stopped drinking first. I stopped next. Jim [James] stopped after me, and Carl [Broemel] and Bo [Koster] have never really consumed too much. So between that, exercise, working on ourselves on our own time, therapy, finding out what works for us—meditation for some, bike rides and hikes for others—we’ve come to a point in our band where all five of us are in the best place we’ve ever been.

I can honestly say to you that 2025 was my favorite year in the band. This is my 25th year. It took 25 years to have my favorite year of the band, and it’s all because of the things that you’re asking about.

All of the alcohol and therapy and fitness and drinking enough water and getting enough sleep is the electron cloud around the nucleus that is mental health.

In this context can you about your connection with 1 Million Strong?

I can’t say enough about 1 Million Strong. When I found out about them, it ticked so many boxes for me. That happened when we were trying to think of something for our last festival, One Big Holiday. I went down there to see the site and people were making plans for bars, signature cocktails and all this stuff. I was like, “Well, what about the people that don’t drink?” Then Kristen Bunk from our management team said, “You should check out 1 Million Strong.”

So I did, and they set up an activation that was a zero-spirit wellness oasis in the middle of all the madness. That way the people who didn’t consume alcohol or were just trying to clear their minds had a place to go.

Honestly, who doesn’t enjoy a well-thought-out something in a glass that doesn’t have booze in it? A lot of it is just pageantry. A lot of it is just a treat at the end of a task or an activity. So 1 Million Strong really nailed that. It was brilliant, and it became this little haven. I popped by a couple of times and it was more crowded than the bars.

I’m just so happy that people have a place to go where they can unwind and take a break from the crazy energy of our event or a sporting event or anything like that.

They really tapped into something special and meaningful and I think there will be amazing results from that ripple effect.

Revisiting your past year with My Morning Jacket, 2025 started out at the MusiCares event honoring the Grateful Dead [where MMJ performed “One More Saturday Night” with Maggie Rose]. Back in 2013 you played with Bob Weir while out on the AmericanaramA tour. What comes to mind when you think back on all that?

It’s so crazy to get caught up in that hurricane. We have our own dedicated fan base that follows us to shows. We see so many familiar faces, but the Grateful Dead brought a city wherever they went, and to get caught up in that energy is just beautiful—to see what those guys did and are still doing. They’re living their truth. They’re following the muse and providing this thing that not only brings them so much joy but then you look out in the crowd and clearly it’s bringing joy to so many other people. Getting to honor them was really cool.

But getting to play with Bobby years ago, we could see how the magic happened. It was cool to feel like he folded into our band really quickly. When he stepped on stage, it was just like another member of the band had showed up. I don’t think that’s only My Morning Jacket. I think he’s just that guy. He has this universal ability to be able to just be him wherever he goes, and that’s the ultimate goal.

That’s what I was talking about earlier. Bobby’s found a way to wake up every day and be the best Bobby he can be.

It felt great to be part of that event given the art that they’ve made throughout the years that’s moved us all so much. It was also amazing to see the mixture of artists who were there to honor them. It was like, “Hey, Grateful Dead. Take a look at what you’ve inspired.” That was probably the biggest “Grateful Dead, this is your life” event of their existence. It was so cool.

photo: Levi Pervin () via Patrick Hallahan’s IG

For me, one of the principal lessons I took away from the Grateful Dead as a fan, is the idea of being confident but egoless.

That’s just being water. Taking the shape of whatever container is around you, but you’re the universal solvent the whole time. You’re right it’s egoless.

I see that in a lot of great chefs too. So many young chefs come in and they’re just making it fancy and over the top—all the flavors are crazy and the presentations are nuts. Meanwhile, the true masters are worried about boiling a potato in butter perfectly.

To watch Bob sit there, work through a song, and play the same chord with like 15 different voicings up a neck, if you know, you know the level of mastery that’s there. Then when you have that level of mastery and that absence of ego, you become a true collaborator—someone who can literally step into any situation, knock it out of the park and make something really special.

That reminds me of the apprentice sushi chefs who spend years learning how to prepare rice before they’re allowed to touch any fish. Okay, final question: My Morning Jacket will ease up on touring this year. What can you say about your own plans for 2026?

The band won’t be touring as much, but we’re already working on new music and plan on recording a new album this year. I have an event company with Chef Demaris Phillips and our company, Hallahan Phillips Events does Sparkle Ball, which you mentioned. We just had a meeting last night about how we’re growing as a company. There are a lot more events coming up.

I’m also part of a festival group that’s putting together something that I can’t say too much about because it’s in its very early phases.

I’m a husband and a father. I love my family. I love spending time at home when I’m here.

I just want to do more. If we’re not on the road as much, I definitely want to explore taking this food thing to another level in some way, shape or form. I have various ideas on that coming to fruition.

I’m just busy. I essentially have four full-time jobs right now, and none of this would be possible if it wasn’t for me stepping away from alcohol and gaining control of my own life as much as one can.

2026 is just already an inspiring year to me. This week has been insane setting up everything for what’s to follow. I’m looking forward to every second of it.

The band has a couple really fun things coming up. We’re not going to do many shows, but the ones that we do will be special. I can’t wait to talk about that too.

I just have so many interests and so many things I want to do. I’m trying not to make a job out of all of them, so I can enjoy each of them as a hobby. We’ll see how that works out. [Laughs.]