Now two years without alcohol, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter explains how writing music and poetry acts as a healthy outlet for her, with a mission to share songs that are, as she describes, “productive and helpful.”

Content warning: This episode contains mentions of death, as well as in-depth discussions of substance use, suicide and sexual abuse. If you or someone you know is struggling with a mental health or substance use disorder, please contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at (800) 662-4357. These programs provide free, confidential support 24/7. You are not alone.

Episode transcript

Elizabeth Vargas:

Mary Lambert, welcome to Heart of the Matter.

Mary Lambert:

Hi. Wow, you have such a wonderful voice.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Well, coming from you, I’m very, very flattered because you are the woman with the golden, the dulcet tones, as they say. I should say on the outset, I’m a huge fan. “Same Love” is one of my favorite songs, and your vocals on it are just gorgeous.

Mary Lambert:

Thank you. I really appreciate that.

Elizabeth Vargas:

We’ll get into your story in a second, but can you just tell me how that came about? Because it was, in many ways, a big break for you. Macklemore calling you up and saying, “Hey, I want you to sing with me on this song.” How did that happen?

Mary Lambert:

It’s like a freak accident. It shouldn’t have happened. But I had started doing, I was a songwriter since I was like 13, but I had started performing spoken word poetry, and I had just been what felt … I just left the Evangelical Church and I was really struggling with my relationship with the church and my relationship with God and my queerness. I tried to write songs about it and it never felt true to me. It had felt a little contrived as I was trying to write them. When I found spoken word, it was a way for me to really express anger and frustration with this community that’s all about love and Jesus’ compassion and how alienated I felt, and how antithetical to Christianity homophobia is.

I explored that a lot in my poetry, and I had a friend that was very supportive of my work and knew that I was also a songwriter and a singer. I had performed a bit around town. I still didn’t have any formal releases out. There was no way you could really find my music. I think there was a YouTube video of me singing somewhere, and a friend of a friend who knew Macklemore and Ryan knew they were working on this song about gay rights and the context of church, the element of church in the song. She was like, “Oh, Mary is the perfect person to deliver this.” She called me up and said, “Do you want to do a song with Macklemore?” I was like, “Yeah, I think that sounds kind of cool.”

Elizabeth Vargas:

Yeah, I think I’m not busy. I think I can make that day work any day for the next two years.

Mary Lambert:

Totally. She’s like, “Can you come in tonight? Here’s the song, they’re on a really tight deadline. Can you try to come up with something today?” I had about two or three hours with the song and I came up with about four different choruses, and I showed up to the studio. I met them the first time. I sang to them what I had written, and that’s what we tracked that night, and that’s the song that you hear. It happened very quickly.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You wrote the part that you sing?

Mary Lambert:

I did, yes.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Okay. Actually, I should have warned, asked if I could do this. Is there any way you could just sing part of that for me?

Mary Lambert:

Sure.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Okay.

Mary Lambert:

I can’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to. My love, my love, my love, she keeps me warm. She keeps me warm.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Oh my God, that’s so pretty.

Mary Lambert:

Thank you.

Elizabeth Vargas:

How did you come up with those words? Because they sound, oh my gosh, authentic doesn’t even begin to describe that. Obviously, you’re writing and singing from a place of deep personal experience. You were a kid who really struggled growing up with all sorts of mental health issues. A kid who self-medicated with alcohol. A kid who felt different from the first time you can remember, and a kid who was struggling with a church in which you grew up that didn’t accept you as a gay woman.

Mary Lambert:

Yeah, I think when I write, melody comes really naturally to me. Vocalizing is just, I’m constantly singing, I’ve always been that way. It used to be the most annoying thing to my sister, and it just really hasn’t ended. I just sing all the time. Melody is never really an issue for me when I’m writing music, but I like to be really intentional with lyric writing and with what I want to communicate to the world. If I’m writing something for myself, I don’t care as much about the reception of it or what people will take away from it. It is like, it’s just my own sense of healing and what I need to say out loud in that moment.

Then, through the process of editing and finessing something, I will try to be a little bit more intentional and think about impact and think if, okay, what would it be like for a seven-year old to hear this? What would it be like for somebody who’s dealing with X, Y, and Z? What about a nonbeliever? What about somebody who’s super homophobic? How do I reach all of these people and create universal themes while still being authentic to myself and create something beautiful, something that’s also personal? When they sent me that song, I realized there was already so much direction of a pragmatic, logical, “Hey, this isn’t okay.” But I realized there was an element of humanness to humanize, I guess, queer people.

Because in the church we’re just really seen as dirty sinners that are just indulging our sins. If I can bring it back to love, if I can say, this is what it feels like to love and to be loved, and that person that keeps you warm at night is a really universal thing. If I can ninja my way in to a conservative Christian’s heart, then maybe I have a chance of having them see my humanity.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Were you nervous at all about … Macklemore is huge, huge. This song was huge, a monster hit.

Mary Lambert:

Yes.

Elizabeth Vargas:

As you yourself put it in one interview, you were basically getting up on a massive, enormous world stage and telling the entire world you’re gay.

Mary Lambert:

Yeah. It was terrifying, but I wasn’t really scared of the career aspect of it or the performance aspect of it really. Because from a young age I have always felt a little delusional. I don’t know if delusional is the right word, but I had this, I know I’m supposed to be doing something like this. It felt very natural, like a natural set of events to happen. I was the person that when I was 19 I told my boss that I might need Sundays off for award shows. I was ready for this and I was ready to do something that was deeply impactful and it made sense to me. It’s taken me a while to say that out loud because I don’t want it to reflect a lack of humility.

But I think it’s also fair to be like, I know I’m good at this and I knew that I would be the right person for this specific job. This thing that I do now in my career, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You did call your mom though and admitted in an interview that you were nervous to tell her about the song and your role in it.

Mary Lambert:

Yes. Oh my God, yes. I will say in terms of the career stuff and the platform that I was given, that all felt very natural to me. The idea that I would be talking about being gay in front of thousands, if not millions of people, was really scary. That was absolutely terrifying. Before we went out on tour, I made sure I had a will. I was sure-

Elizabeth Vargas:

A will?

Mary Lambert:

A will.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Why?

Mary Lambert:

Because we were touring and the hatred and opposition on the other side was really scary at times.

Elizabeth Vargas:

What do you mean? What did that look like?

Mary Lambert:

It was a lot more comments than anything, online responses, accounts we’d hear from other people. The Westboro Baptist Church protested at one of our shows.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Oh my gosh, really?

Mary Lambert:

Yeah, “nasty dyke Mary Lambert.” In our little metropolitan areas it feels like, duh, gay people have always been here and they walk on the sidewalk too. But it’s like you go 40 minutes outside of that and it’s a different world. We were touring all across America, and so I knew if we were heading to these other places, I don’t know what’s going to happen. We had heard a lot of feedback that radio stations were getting threats on the phone, like “turn the shit off,” whatever it is, and so I was scared. That fear really loosened and lessened as time went on. Especially, it was like, “Oh, I’m not going to experience a hate crime. I’m going to get a Grammy nomination.” It was like, “Okay, everything is okay.”

Elizabeth Vargas:

I’ll take the Grammy, please.

Mary Lambert:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Vargas:

I think a lot of our audience, this is a podcast dedicated to mental health and substance use disorder. The statistics are pretty amazing. We see that especially not just young adults and kids, but older adults like myself, people who are LGBTQ are more likely to be depressed or anxious or deal with mental health issues. They are more likely to turn to substances to relieve the pain, ease the pain, ease the discomfort. They’re more likely to have suicidal ideation. You check all three of those boxes as a kid.

Mary Lambert:

Yeah. Gold star.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Yeah, gold star. You wrote in one interview that you spent much of your life feeling really weird and uncomfortable with yourself. That you know that people think that there’s a predisposition to mental illness, but you think yours is actually born from trauma. How young were you when you were grappling with some of these feelings of being different, being an outsider, being so uncomfortable with yourself? At what age did that start?

Mary Lambert:

I don’t remember a time that I didn’t feel that way.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Really?

Mary Lambert:

Yeah. As soon as I entered school, I think that’s when I felt weird. But I experienced sexual abuse from my dad. I think having that happen, because it was early, unfortunately, it was really early childhood stuff. I think experiencing that lent itself to feelings of discomfort and feeling unclean. Feeling like there was something wrong with me pretty early on, and we were also really poor. All of a sudden, when you get into school you’re like, “Oh, you have different shoes that you wear. Your shoes don’t have holes in them” or whatever it is. You start to compare yourself. As soon as that comparative thing started happening, that was immediately when I was like, “Oh, there’s something weird about me.”

When I first entered grade school, I didn’t talk. I was very much dissociating. I think, a lot of the time. I had created an entirely different world that I lived in and I was the kid talking to themselves. I didn’t feel connected to reality. I think now learning what I have about the unfortunate repercussions, the unfortunate consequences to sexual abuse, and especially early sexual trauma, is that dissociating is that, like, this isn’t happening. I think that’s been my go-to coping mechanism, and that’s really when it started.

Elizabeth Vargas:

I’m so sorry you went through that.

Mary Lambert:

Thank you.

Elizabeth Vargas:

It’s very common for children to blame themselves, when especially parents do something terrible to them because you just simply can’t imagine that this human being on whom you rely and love could do something like that. You said you were in therapy from the time you were four. Did I read that correctly?

Mary Lambert:

Probably closer to five or six, but it’s not a big deal. Yeah, but very young.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Still pretty young, pretty young. Did it help?

Mary Lambert:

I guess I could never know for sure, but I think what I felt is, I want this person to like me. I want to make this person really happy. But I think because I was so disconnected, it just really didn’t help maybe the way that it should have. But who knows? I feel like a very well adjusted person. Maybe it’s because of, how many years, 30 years of therapy.

Elizabeth Vargas:

As you grew up, you turned more and more, you were always into writing poetry, right?

Mary Lambert:

Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Vargas:

At one point though in your teenage years you were diagnosed as being bipolar, which is rough. That’s tough. That’s tough to deal with. You said at that point you were turning to alcohol and self-harm to cope with all of that. Tell me what that looked like in your life, because that’s a common thing. A lot of people, especially teenagers, don’t want to feel something so they will turn to a substance or a self-harming behavior that relieves that feeling or masks that feeling.

Mary Lambert:

Totally.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Or, numbs that feeling.

Mary Lambert:

I think my personal experience was that the bipolar diagnosis was really, I didn’t believe it. I talked to my doctor and then a psychiatrist and they diagnosed me bipolar. I have an aunt and uncle that are also bipolar, so it runs in the family. But I had this feeling where I was like, “No, I’ve just experienced a lot of tough stuff.” I’m also in theater, so I’m just really dramatic. Because it felt inconvenient, it felt like just adding another block to the house of pain. I was like, “I don’t want another thing. I don’t need another thing. I already have so many things. I would rather not deal with that.” So, I didn’t. I said I didn’t want to go on medication.

Also, there was this thing going on at that time, I think, that I felt like a lot of people in my group in high school were getting diagnosed with a lot of different things. I felt skeptical, and I was reading headlines about over-diagnosing, and are kids really ADD or are they just kids? I felt personally skeptical that, “No, I’m just moody. I’m just super hormonal because I’m a teenager and I am having mood swings because I don’t know how to self-regulate.” That was my being dismissive about it. Drinking and smoking and what I experienced was less … It didn’t feel like a coping mechanism. It felt like a way to bond with my friends. It felt like a way to, I felt cool.

I felt like I can do what they’re doing. Isn’t it funny when I’m drunk and you like me more, right? Because I’m so funny and I felt like I could call somebody and I have more confidence. That was the impetus for it, but then it did become its own beast.

Elizabeth Vargas:

How so?

Mary Lambert:

As I got older, it became less about doing something social or doing something that was fun and more just like, “I have to do this.” It just became a compulsion, this, “I have to drink.” It wasn’t just like, I have to drink. It’s like, I have to get drunk. It wasn’t like, “Oh, we’re going to have a drink tonight.” It’s like, “Let’s get fucked up tonight.” That’s the dependency.

Elizabeth Vargas:

How much of that factored in to your attempted suicide, which happened when you were 17, and how serious was the attempt? Was it a cry for help or was it an actual attempt?

Mary Lambert:

Yeah, I would say it’s more on the cry for help spectrum. Things got really bad. I got my bipolar diagnosis when I was in middle school or going into high school. I had had this whole history of trauma. My mom’s husband and then different partners continuing to be abusive. I just experienced a whole lot, and I had some serious issues mentally and emotionally just coping and being okay. Then, when I was 16, I was with my friend and we snuck into an army barracks because she was dating a guy that lived on the base, and I was gang raped in the army barracks.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Oh my God.

Mary Lambert:

I really relied on church at that time. I started going to church a lot more. Then, I realized I was queer. That’s around the time that things got really difficult because here’s this what feels like the last thing I have left, because I’ve been harmed in all of these other ways. Then, I lost one of my band mates to cancer, and this is all in my senior year of high school. I was in a 90-mile an hour car collision. There are so many ways that I shouldn’t have survived, but I did, but it felt unbearable. It felt absolutely unbearable. I was dating a girl for the first time and we were both Christian and we both had pretty intense guilt about being queer.

We had resolved that we were going to repent every day, even though we were going to date, we were going to apologize to God because we knew we were actively sinning. When you’re 17 and you’re already experiencing feelings of not fitting in, then to be like, “I am deemed to hell,” just the stakes are really high. She had more access to alcohol, so I was drinking a lot with her. Then, it became clear that we were not going to end up together. I knew she was going to break up with me. I was going through all of this pretty much in the span of six months and I just snapped. The attempt I had was the day after going into Seattle with my friends and it was one of those “Perks of Being a Wallflower” I feel infinite moments, hands out of the window looking at the city lights. Just the best time of my life. I remember feeling like I want to end on this note. I think that I’m going to treasure this moment and this is going to be my last day on earth. I think it’s time for me to go, because I know that I can’t always have that. I know that’s not always going to be the reality. If this is the peak, if this is what brings me so much joy, then I know the next day there’s going to be a comedown. There are so much turmoil in my life that I’m not going to be able to bear it. I can’t do it. I can’t hold it all. I found every pill bottle I could in the house and I had them all in my hand and I was ready.

Then, I started taking one and two and then I was like, I have this nagging feeling that’s like, “You’re supposed to do something here and you have to stay.” I was angry. I was resentful of that voice because I didn’t want to stick it out. It’s really hard to stick it out. It hurts, it’s difficult. I don’t want to suffer anymore, and so I decided to call a friend. I had resolved, “If this friend doesn’t make me feel better, then I’ll continue. I’ll do what I’m going to.” But someone needs to know that this is what’s happening because nobody knows. I’m not telling anybody and I’m not leaving a suicide note or something. I know I’m being impulsive. If there’s one person that’s going to pull me out of this, let me just try to call up. And I talked to her and it really helped.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You said later, because exactly a year later you went to music school on a scholarship.

Mary Lambert:

Yes.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You said that “Music for me was like survival. It was a form of healing and almost self-therapy.”

Mary Lambert:

Yes.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Is that what pulled you out of that hole? Is that what brought you to safety? If so, how so? How is it that music is so therapeutic and cathartic for you?

Mary Lambert:

I don’t know if it’s the thing that did it. I think the thing that did it was love and realizing that there’s all kinds of love. Just because I wasn’t experiencing romantic love right in that minute, that I was experiencing platonic love and I was experiencing the beauty and the love of community and friendship, and that there are other things in the world that I could live for. Music became survival in that it became a way for me to process. Because if I didn’t have an outlet to process, I would be holding it all the time. It’s like being able to get it out on paper or with my voice. There’s just so much healing and catharsis there to be able to say exactly what happened to you and to say out loud, “I deserve more, I want more, I want to feel better.”

That’s powerful. Because I think sometimes people really scoff at affirmations or mantras or things like that, but they are really powerful. If I can create affirmations through a song, and that’s what I did. Even if the messages were maybe not the most positive, if they were songs that were depressing, it was like, I got to massage them out of myself and it felt like I got to release them. I also saw the impact that it had on other people when I shared it. That felt really motivating to continue.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Do you know off the top of your head, can you either read to me or sing to me some of those things that you wrote that you know connected with other people or that helped you massage that out?

Mary Lambert:

Yeah, I think I wrote a song on “Heart On My Sleeve” called “Sum of Our Parts.” I felt that that was healing for people.

Elizabeth Vargas:

How does it go?

Mary Lambert:

We are, we are more than our scars. We are, we are more than the sum of our parts.

Elizabeth Vargas:

We are, we are more than our scars. We are, we are more than the sum of our parts.

Mary Lambert:

Yeah, I think when I started talking publicly about the pain that I had experienced and the trauma that I had gone through, sometimes I felt like I was reducing my entire life to these trauma points. I was like, I don’t want my whole life to be defined by these things that were incredibly difficult for me. I had to process through them. I had to write them out. I’m so glad I had an outlet for that. Being able to sing through it and share what that looked like for me in a really vulnerable way. Here is this invitation for other people to share how they feel, what they’ve experienced.

That it’s okay, and that this is really painful and uncomfortable, but it’s okay. We have to make it okay. It already happened. I have to get to a place where I have peace with it, and I think music helped me find that peace.

Elizabeth Vargas:

It’s very difficult, as you just said, to be so open and so public about things that were so deeply personal and incredibly difficult in your life. Do you ever regret being that open?

Mary Lambert:

No, I don’t regret it. I think when I recorded my single after “She Keeps Me Warm,” I recorded a song called “Secrets” and the first line of “Secrets” is “I have bipolar disorder.” I wanted to do a tongue in cheek, really subversive approach to being really open and what it means to be vulnerable and that it can actually be really freeing and really fun. But I certainly, the next day after recording it, I was like, “Am I really about to tell everyone that I have bipolar disorder really publicly?”

Elizabeth Vargas:

Right after I just told the entire world that I’m gay really publicly.

Mary Lambert:

Yeah, exactly.

Elizabeth Vargas:

“Same Love,” yeah.

Mary Lambert:

But I think “Same Love” really gave me a template for the kind of artist that I wanted to be, which is what I was already expressing in my art. It showed me that not only is it really cathartic and helpful for me to be brutally honest about my experiences, but you can go triple platinum. Here’s this template that not only is it great for so many reasons, but it’s also maybe it’s my way of navigating this industry because I don’t think that I would be able to do it otherwise. I don’t think that I could go on stage and have a persona or say something I didn’t totally a hundred percent with confidence believe.

I needed to talk about heavier issues because it made me feel like my platform and my place in this world had meaning. I like my music to be a kind of utility. I want it to be productive and helpful. That’s where I share from. It’s not necessarily where I write from. I think I’ve probably written close to 300 songs that I will … a lot of which I’ll never share because I don’t know that some of the really dark things or the really sad things that I write about I don’t believe will be a net positive in the world. I think they’re, for me personally, to heal through something and talk through something. I get to have that. That never goes away, but I get to be really intentional about what I share and what I promote out into the world.

I feel like when we have conversations about what art deserves to be made or what we platform, I think these are important conversations to have because the intention is really important. Understanding your impact should be a thoughtful process, should be deliberate. I think it’s important.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Well, the song went triple platinum because obviously a lot of people really related to it. Do you hear from fans given that you’re writing about something we know, just statistically, nevermind everybody’s own personal experiences, knowing somebody who has struggled with their sexuality at a very young age, knowing somebody who may be bullied for that or ostracized or shunned for that. Knowing somebody who’s struggling with trauma or depression or anxiety. I’m curious, do you hear from fans after you write these deeply personal songs that are clearly selling because they’re clearly connecting?

Mary Lambert:

Oh, all the time.

Elizabeth Vargas:

What are they saying?

Mary Lambert:

Yeah, especially right after “Same Love,” the responses were constant and so heart-wrenching to read and also felt like, “Wow, okay, we’re doing something that’s really helping people.” That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, is help people. But yeah, sometimes they’re as simple as, “I was able to come out to my parents with this song. I put the song in the car and I got to tell my parents that I am gay.” Or “My dad understands me more because he listened to your song.” Then, sometimes it was, I had a woman who was a pastor at a church that had been closeted for 20 years and she was like, “I don’t want to be closeted anymore. I’m going to come out to my church, and I am going to accept that I’m probably going to lose my job. They’re not going to let me stay, but I need to live my truth. I was inspired by your song.”

Elizabeth Vargas:

What was your mom’s reaction when you called her up and told her about “Same Love?” Because you told me how nervous you were that she was in a church that frowned upon homosexuality. What was her reaction?

Mary Lambert:

Okay. It’s complicated. My mom is queer. My mom is bisexual and at this point was dating, had been with this woman, my stepmom for 15 years. It wasn’t that she wasn’t accepting. She at this point was going to an affirming Episcopal church. It wasn’t necessarily that. I was nervous to tell her because I knew she would be scared for my safety. When I came out to her when I was 17, she was like, “It’s just a phase.” You’d think coming from someone who’s in the LGBTQ community that she would be a little bit more affirming, but I think she just thought I wanted to be special or something, or have something different about me. Her whole thing was just, “I just want you to be safe. Just don’t hold hands in public and just really keep it to yourself.”

Singing this and writing this song on such a large stage or large platform was the exact opposite of that. She was worried about my safety. Also, at that time, Macklemore was, he wasn’t a household name at that point. He was definitely Washington State and Seattle famous and had a really good following. But it was before “Thrift Shop,” so I had to be like, “Oh, it’s this rapper. His name is Macklemore” and explain his thing, so it just took some time.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Was “Same Love” on the same album as “Thrift Shop?”

Mary Lambert:

Yes. Yes. “Thrift Shop” was the first single. They had released “Same Love” as a partnership for Referendum 74 in Washington State, which was the Marriage Equality State Bill that had gone through. It was exciting because we were legalizing same-sex marriage in Washington State, but I don’t think they thought it was going to be a big single. That wasn’t the goal, but the real trajectory changed when the music video came out. The music video I think contextualized and humanized even further the experience of being queer and feeling othered. Then, feeling home and safe and that we’re all human and we all have hurts and we deserve equal treatment. It was pretty much after “Thrift Shop,” and then “Can’t Hold Us,” and then “Same Love” had its own arc.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Macklemore, who’s also very famously sober, has written songs about it, how did you make the decision, turn that corner and put down what was clearly an unhealthy relationship to alcohol?

Mary Lambert:

It didn’t happen until two years ago, if that-

Elizabeth Vargas:

Two years ago?

Mary Lambert:

It’s been a year and a half.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Wow. Congrats.

Mary Lambert:

Thank you. I still will have edibles and I have a healthy relationship with cannabis. I don’t think that for me drinking was as destructive as maybe it was for other people. I was the kind of person where I could go six months without drinking. But the second that I decided I was going to have a drink, I’m like, “Yeah, let’s get drunk. Let’s go to town.” I was bartending from when I was 21 to 23 or 24. Those are some fuzzy years of my life. I was getting blackout drunk almost every night. I just wouldn’t remember. I wouldn’t remember closing down the bar. I wouldn’t remember conversations, and to the point where I would panic at 7:00 AM when I’d wake up and I’d be like, “I don’t think I shut the bar down.”

I’d run across the street. I worked very close to the bar that I worked at. I’d run over to the bar and I would look around and I thought somebody came in to clean, but it was me, I did it.

Elizabeth Vargas:

You had done it all in a blackout?

Mary Lambert:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Wow.

Mary Lambert:

That scared me because I’m like, “What else am I doing? What else am I doing that I don’t remember and that I’m … ” Yeah, it’s scary. It’s just scary.

Elizabeth Vargas:

It’s scary because so much can happen to a young woman who’s in a blackout. We know, we see this almost daily on college campuses and high schools and cities all over.

Mary Lambert:

Absolutely.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Where you’re in an extremely vulnerable position.

Mary Lambert:

Yes, and I just loved, but I loved cocktail culture. I worked at a craft cocktail bar and I loved … It felt artistic. It felt like foodies, but people that like fine cocktails. I had always imagined, and I liked, really, I liked wine, I liked it for the taste. I liked things to taste really good. The complexities of all of it, I really enjoyed it. But I didn’t know how to not go so far in the other direction. When I toured with Macklemore, that was a sober tour. The drinking culture wasn’t there on that tour, but we’d go out to the bars afterwards and have our fun. But the culture really wasn’t there to support that.

But when I started touring on my solo tours, it was very important to have liquor or wine in the green room. It just went pretty hard in the paint, smoking and drinking at that time. I didn’t really see an issue with it. I remember having a conversation with a girl I was dating at that time and I was like, “It’s not that big of a deal to get blackout drunk.” She was like, “It is a big deal to get blackout drunk.” I was like, “If it happens a couple times a year, that’s not that big of a deal.” Because in my head I’m like, “Listen, I used to blackout multiple times a week, a couple times a year is not bad.” I didn’t see it as something being that bad.

But now, in retrospect as a non-drinker, I’m like, “Yeah, it’s not ever good. You should never get to the point where you’re getting blackout drunk. That’s not good.” If that happens, then that should be something that you strive to correct.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Well, Mary, it has been such a great honor to talk to you. I’m always struck by something that you said at the 10th anniversary of the National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day, where you were honored and you say, “Growing up is difficult for anyone. But for those of us who experience mental disorders or childhood abuse, it can be especially challenging. As an artist living with bipolar disorder, there are days when it is an accomplishment to just get out of bed. The sooner we can be honest about our experiences, the sooner we can focus on our own self-love and self-care.” Thank you so much for doing so much through your songs and being so honest.

Because, clearly, you’re connecting with a lot of people who have struggled with all the same things you’ve struggled with. Too many of us keep those struggles and trials and challenges hidden deep away, where they fester and grow and eat away at us inside. Thank you for your honesty. It was wonderful to talk to you today.

Mary Lambert:

Thank you so much. This was an honor.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Thanks, Mary.