However, everything he worked for almost came crashing down in 2001 when he overdosed on heroin, which left him in a coma for two weeks. “I wasn’t like a junkie per se, but I was partying,” he later recalled on Apple Music’s Beats 1. “Here was a year where the partying just got a little too heavy. Thank God on some level this guy gave me the wrong line with the wrong thing one night and I woke up going, ‘What the f–k happened?’ That was a real changing point for me.”

Indeed, more would change for the better: In 2005, he married his wife Allison and the two later welcomed kids Oliver, Annabelle and Everleigh, who continually inspired his later work. “When I was 25, I never thought, ‘I’m going to be a suburban dad someday,'” he told Billboard in 2019. “But that’s what I am, so I can’t write about being young and going to clubs, and I’m not very political. It’s all sort of tongue-in-cheek though.”