Timbaland said opioid addiction heavily affected his personal and professional life.
The veteran producer was a guest on “Tamron Hall” Wednesday and explained that he started taking pills after having a dental procedure in 2007.
“It’s one of those things that, it takes over you,” said Timbaland. “It’s like something that takes over your body. … I don’t want to say this, I don’t want to glorify it, it feels amazing. … For me, it made me feel like a superhero.”
The 47-year-old, who also said that opioids helped with lack of confidence, explained that a friend sent him a text that said he needed help.
Timbaland didn’t respond to that text, at least not right away, but it was the first time the producer thought he might have a problem.
The Virginia Beach native first started taking Vicodin but said it was too weak for him, so he moved on to Oxycontin, which he took 180 milligrams of a day.
“The pills make you function, but sometimes, like, you would nod off while people were talking to you because it would make you fall asleep, but it would make you function because everything feels great,” Timbaland explained. “It can be a bad moment going on, but the pill blocks all that out.”
“I thought that the pills were making me create,” he added. “But as I went back to listen to some of my music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is not a creation, this is a hot mess.'”
Timbaland also said he had trouble hearing notes correctly during his addiction and didn’t realize that others noticed how much he had changed.
“You don’t realize that people can see your movement is very different,” he stated.
Timbaland then said it was God who saved him, because he doesn’t believe any human being could have gotten through to him at that time. He has some insight into why he continued using back then as well.
“My marriage was new and I was scared of it. I think the pills helped me deal with the marriage at the time,” he said about his nuptials to ex-wife Monique Mosley.
“But when I had my daughter and my son, I kept looking like, ‘I want to be here for my kids,’ and it just hit me one day. I didn’t go to rehab; I cut cold turkey,” Timbaland continued. “My kids were my backbone to living.”
Timbaland’s interview with Hall wasn’t the first time he talked about his opioid addiction. In 2017 he opened up to Rolling Stone about it and said Jay-Z once spoke to him.
“Once you’re not popping, it plays with your mind. The pills helped block out the noise. I’d just sleep all day,” said the successful beat maker. “I remember Jay-Z told me one time, ‘Don’t do no more interviews,’ because I was saying crazy sh–. … But I thought about Michael Jackson. I didn’t want to be old and taking these pills.”
