Life as Tim McGraw knows it is a result of Faith Hill.
The “Shotgun Rider” singer admitted to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe on Thursday that he “would’ve died already” or “run [his] career into the ground” if he hadn’t wed his fellow country artist in 1996 at the age of 29.
Hill, 55, “put up with” McGraw’s “wild years” early in their marriage, the 56-year-old McGraw continued.
“I was pretty sneaky about it for a while. But it was just overdoing stuff,” the Grammy winner recalled.
“Then I think when the kids got old enough that they could notice things, [that’s] when she finally said, ‘You’ve got to figure this out,’” he continued of his “brutal” and “honest” partner.
McGraw has been clean for 15 years and is the father of three daughters: Gracie, 26, Maggie, 25, and Audrey, 21.
The musician detailed the day he sought to Hill for assistance with his alcoholism in an essay for Esquire published in August 2021.
“I remember a moment when I was getting out of bed and going to the liquor cabinet and taking a big shot at 8:00 in the morning and thinking, ‘I have to wake the kids up,’” he wrote at the time. “I went straight to my wife and said, ‘This is where I’m at.’ I was scared.”
In return, Hill “just grabbed [him] and hugged” him, and the encounter “changed [his] life.”
McGraw, who became clean in 2008, referred to the singer of “This Kiss” as his “rock” in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment from earlier this month.
“I don’t think I could stand up straight without leaning on her in everything that I do,” the actor gushed, adding that abstaining from alcohol has not been a “linear path” for him.
“There are setbacks and there are times you move forward and do great, and there are times you set back,” he explained. “And that’ll probably [be] a process throughout the rest of my life and something that I have to be diligent about and really continue to work at.”
