Retired Rock Drummer Freda Love Smith Chronicles Her Break From Bad Habits In New Book

For many who experienced and lived through the arrival of COVID and the subsequent lockdown in 2020, the pandemic crisis led to a reevaluation of life’s priorities. That was certainly true in the case of Freda Love Smith, a then-rock drummer and an academic advisor at Northwestern University. By her own admission, she quietly hit rock bottom 10 months into the pandemic. “I probably appeared to be basically fine to anyone who interacted with me on Zoom at the time,” she says now. “But honestly, I was unraveling. And part of it was related to drinking. Like a lot of people at that moment, I was drinking more than I usually had. I was drinking quite habitually. I wasn’t thinking about it. I was unconsciously reaching for whiskey every single night.”

That feeling was further exacerbated during Inauguration Day 2021, she says, which occurred a few weeks after the January 6 Capitol riot. “There was a massive amount of stress and tension in the air,” she recalls. “I was feeling it very hard. And it was really that day after I’d watched the inauguration, there was a sense of relief – everything was fine. But I wanted to drink so badly at that moment, and it was noon, a workday. It deeply startled me out of a kind of stupor that I’d been in. I felt like, ‘Maybe I needed to put the brakes on this for a bit. This is not good. I’m not doing well.’”