In a new interview with the The Lydian Spin podcast, LAMB OF GOD frontman Randy Blythe, who has been sober for the past 14 years, spoke about the challenges of going on tour and being around people who are drinking. The 53-year-old musician said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I can be kind of antisocial in general anyway. By the end of my drinking, I just wanted to be alone: ‘Leave me the fuck alone, and let me drink.'”I can go out,” Randy explained. “I’ll go anywhere. I’m not afraid of being around alcohol or drugs. If I was, I would never tour again. For me, being around utterly shitfaced people is fairly intolerable now. And so if I go to a party, if there’s like a house party, friends of mine are having dinner, I’ll hang out and I’ll hang out until people hit me with the ‘I love you, man,’ like a couple times. I’m, like, ‘Okay, it’s time to go. I had a great time, and you guys can carry on and God bless. Good luck and godspeed. I’m outta here.’ So, I don’t have a problem [being around people who are drinking], and I don’t walk around like some sort of angry curmudgeon, like, ‘Don’t fucking talk to me.’ And when I am trapped by those people, I look at it as a karmic debt. I look at it as a karmic debt, because I fucking terrified and annoyed countless people for decades. So it’s, like, what comes around goes around.”Randy previously discussed his sobriety during a September 2022 appearance on SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk”. He said at the time: “It’s not attractive to sit up and fucking drink and snort coke and say a bunch of stupid shit with a bunch of morons when you’re [in your early 50s]. It’s just not. [Laughs] I haven’t had a hangover in over [more than a decade]. I don’t know if I would survive one now.”Asked by host Eddie Trunk if it was “tough” for him to be on the road where alcohol can be found everywhere, Randy said: “No. Hell no, dude. Seeing people party and stuff, especially when they ‘party party’ and get stupid… I don’t judge, but it makes it more repulsive to me, ’cause I was, like, Jesus… I was pretty bad. Nobody looks cool when they’re wasted, so it just doesn’t appeal to me. And I have better things to do. I’m trying to do good things with my life — write books and do photography and shit like that. I can’t do that when I’m drunk. Plus, man, I drank enough. I did it for 22 years. I’m not gonna discover anything new in drugs and alcohol.”Pressed about whether it bothers him when people around him are drinking, Blythe said: “It doesn’t bother me. It only bothers me if they’re fucking wasted and saying stupid shit to me and then I run. But it doesn’t make me wanna do it, if that’s what you’re asking. It has the opposite effect. Seeing people drink does not bother me at all. The only thing that bothers me is when they’re hammered and in my face. But other than that, I don’t expect the rest of the world to behave… I can’t expect the rest of the world to behave in the way I do and not drink because not everybody’s an alcoholic like me. Some people are perfectly okay, and that’s no problem. God bless. Have a good time. But if you’re wasted and the ‘I love you, man’ starts, then I just dip out. It’s not a problem.”Blythe discussed his battle with alcoholism and how he got sober after a couple of decades of drinking during a book-signing event and question-and-answer session for his memoir, “Dark Days: A Memoir”, in 2015. At the time, he said: “Most people, when they stop… It’s entirely individual… Some people hit bottom because they wake up in jail, because their wife has left them, because they don’t have any money left, because they lost their job, or because they just can’t… they can’t take it anymore.”He continued: “When I woke up the morning… I wrote about this in my book; I wrote about the last night I drank and the first day of sobriety. I woke up, and I was on tour. I was in Australia. I was opening up for the biggest band in metal, in the world — ever, in the history of metal. I was in a beautiful place. I had money in my bank account. My wife hadn’t left me yet — and she still hasn’t, somehow amazingly. And everything on the outside of my life, to anyone looking at it, beyond the fact that I looked kind of busted, everything would look good. Like, this dude is in this band, he’s on this tour in this beautiful place. It’s Australia, it’s paradise. He’s getting paid…. Not millions of dollars; don’t get me wrong. But he’s making money. I woke up one day and I just did not want to do anything. It’s the strangest feeling to not want to… I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to do. I didn’t wanna eat, I didn’t wanna sleep, I didn’t wanna read a book, I didn’t wanna go to work, I didn’t wanna… drink. I couldn’t imagine not drinking. I didn’t want to do anything. I felt completely empty.”Blythe added: “So, for me, it was a very emotional flatline… like, bottom. It wasn’t anything traumatic whatsoever. I just reached a point where I was, like, ‘I’ve gotta do something else, or else I might as well be dead.’ And I firmly believe I would be dead [by now if I hadn’t stopped]. So it was just a weird thing. I don’t know why. I drank 22 years — heavy — and finally I got enough pain where it’s, like, ‘Okay, this sucks. I’ve gotta stop.’ But it’s different for everyone. Anybody who’s ever had a drinking problem can tell you that it’s different for everyone.”Blythe’s second book, “Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head”, is due on February 18, 2025 via Grand Central Publishing (GCP).”Just Beyond The Light” was described by Blythe as a “tight, concise roadmap of how I have attempted to maintain what I believe to be a proper perspective in life, even during difficult times.”Last month, Blythe announced more spoken-word and question-and-answer events to promote “Just Beyond The Light”. The special “evening with” event includes a spoken-word performance, an audience question-and-answer session, a copy of “Just Beyond The Light” and an opportunity to have the book signed.In 2012, Blythe was arrested in the Czech Republic and charged with manslaughter for allegedly pushing a 19-year-old fan offstage at a show two year prior and causing injuries that led to the fan’s death. Blythe spent 37 days in a Prague prison before ultimately being found not guilty in 2013.Blythe’s prison experience inspired two songs on LAMB OF GOD’s 2015 album “VII: Sturm Und Drang”: “512”, one of his three prison cell numbers, and “Still Echoes”, written while he was in Pankrac Prison, a dilapidated facility built in the 1880s that had been used for executions by the Nazis during World War II. It also led him to write his first book, “Dark Days”, in which he shared his whole side of the story publicly for the first time.[embedded content]