ALTERNATIVE BAND SISTER HAZEL MAKES A POWERFUL STATEMENT ABOUT ADDICTION

Sister Hazel, an alternative band from Florida, have just created a powerful song and video for You Won’t See Me Again, which deals with addiction.     Guitarist Andrew Copeland wrote the song, and when singer Ken Block checked it out, it had significant meaning to him. Block recalled when his bandmates and family staged an intervention, and he joked, “If you get intervened by a rock band, you’ve got some problems.” (Block has been sober for 15 years.)    Copeland wrote the song after losing a family member to drinking, and as Block tells Billboard, “Collectively we’ve certainly all dealt with people in our lives with addiction or alcoholism. Drew had just lost his brother-in-law to alcoholism. He just literally drank himself to death. It was horrible to watch, and when he sat down to write it, it came from a real, honest place, and spoke so loudly to me.”    Additionally, Block’s brother in law had died last year from addiction, which he said, “just rips the air out of your lungs.” And indeed, Block acknowledged how much collateral damage that can come from addiction, as well as how much people can misunderstand the disease. “A lot of times people react to alcoholism or addiction as [if addicts] are weak, or it’s just a matter of willpower. It’s a disease, a chronic, progressive disease. Unless you reach out and get help, it only ends in a couple of ways, and that’s institutions, jail or death.”     While it wasn’t easy for Block to go into rehab, he had a young son at the time which gave him greater incentive to clean up his act. “I let other people that had success with sobriety and recovery and trauma help me navigate. It’s the best thing I ever did. People look at recovery or giving up drugs or alcohol or going into treatment as punishment. It’s not. It’s really a gift. If you go in there looking at it as an opportunity…it’s like college for life.”