Nashville’s Most Badass Songwriter Travis Meadows Shares Tragic Life Stories
Travis Meadows will turn 50 in May. Which is nothing short of a miracle. Nashville’s most brutally honest songwriter, who has had songs cut by Eric Church, Dierks Bentley and Jake Owen — all of whom shake their heads in awe when his name is mentioned — admits that he simply should not be here.
“I probably had 413 second chances,” Meadows says in his Mississippi drawl, his eyes red around the edges, his face creased.
Raised by his grandmother, Meadows’ first memory was of watching his brother drown. At age 14, he was threatened by cancer, which he beat, but at the heavy cost of his right leg. Later, he skirted the boundaries of addiction before sobering up and becoming a Christian missionary for 17 years, substituting, as he says, one addiction for another. “When I was getting high, I wanted everybody to be high,” he quips. “When I found Jesus, I wanted everybody to get Jesus.”
He eventually landed in Nashville, determined to follow a far-fetched dream of writing country songs. He had some success, scoring a deal with Universal Music Publishing. But at 38, overcome by dependence on alcohol and a life seemingly defined by loss, Meadows hit rock bottom.
“Up until I was 38, I would always get back up. But at 38, I was just done. I laid down,” he says, sipping on coffee in one of his favorite East Nashville hangouts. “I had a real bad day that lasted six years.”
Around that time — his memory is fuzzy — he made the first of four trips to rehab.
“I’ve struggled with addiction my whole life. I remember I was five or six years old and I’d have a stomachache, and they’d give me Paregoric, which has opium in it. It felt so good, I’d get stomachaches all the time so I could take it,” he says. “But my drug of choice is ‘more.’ If I had a bottle of pills, I’d take the whole bottle. I loved cocaine when I was drinking, because it helped me drink more.”