Chart topper Ed Sheeran who first broke into the mainstream with his song “The A-Team,” which chronicles the pitfalls of substance abuse, has recently revealed that he fell into the kind of lifestyle that his single warned about.

“All the pitfalls that people read about, I just found myself slipping into all of them. Mostly like, substance abuse. I never touched anything. I started slipping into it and that’s why I took a year off and buggered off,” Sheeran said during a recent appearance at The Jonathan Ross Show.

In October of 2015, the singer announced that he would be taking a year off. Back then his reason for doing so seemed to be more due to wanting a break from the “celebrity” life, since he said that he wanted to “get rid of my iPhone, get rid of internet, get a Nokia 3310 and just go off into the wilderness somewhere for a bit. Even if it’s just a month without contact with other people.”

Ed Sheeran then elaborated how his problems with substance abuse crept up on him, and it wasn’t something that he picked up immediately when he became famous.

“I didn’t really notice it was happening. It just started gradually happening, and then some people took me to one side and were like, ‘Calm yourself down,’” he said. “It’s all fun to begin with, it all starts off as a party and then you’re doing it on your own and it’s not, so that was a wake-up call and taking a year off.”

He credits his focus on working and achieving his goals in helping him stay away from substance abuse. “I focused on work, and I can’t work under the influence. I can’t write songs under the influence. I can’t perform under the influence. So, the more I worked, the less (it happened).” Sheeran then added, “I’ve worked my whole life to get to where I am, and you can’t lose that over something that you do in your spare time.”

We have lost a lot of musicians over the years due to substance abuse. So it is good that Ed Sheeran was able to recognize the problem and worked on himself before things got too serious. Hopefully other celebrities who may have the same experience would follow suit.