FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH singer Ivan Moody says he actually died for three-and-a-half minutes once following an alcohol-related seizure.
In a new talk with Metal Hammer, Ivan recalls how his body shut down after he quit drinking in an attempt get sober.
“I died!” he says. “I’d been on a bender for about two years, and I’d gone four days without drinking in an entire year! Which is ridiculous. So, for four days I locked myself inside the house, and the fourth day my daughter came over and I went to hand her a glass of water, and that’s all I remember.”
The FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH singer, who battled alcoholism for years before the incident, says it was a result of his attempt to stop drinking cold turkey.
“If you quit drinking without the right medications and whatever else, you will die,” he said. “That’s what happened. I was dead for about three and a half minutes, and I became part of something while I was there. I say ‘there’, because I was not in this shell. And for the first time in my existence, I felt peace.”
Moody says he experienced “a blue haze… it was very quiet and peaceful, and I remember not worrying about anything. I didn’t have an unidirectional view. It was wide, and I could see and feel everything. There was no matter involved, I was pure energy, and I saw this incredibly blue light. It was the afterlife and I was on the edge.”
Ivan went on to say that it was his daughter who helped pull him back. “The next thing I know, I was laying there with two paddles on my chest, and my daughter was crying in my face. My daughter was the one saying, ‘Please, not now.’ Her voice pulled me back and that was the wake-up call for me.”
Moody re-enacted the eye opening incident in the video for FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH‘s 2022 single “The Tragic Truth“. Ivan’s daughter, who briefly appears in the video, asked him how much of the experience was real.
“I said, ‘My love, almost all of it,’” Ivan recalls. “And it was the most refreshing, fearful moment of my life, just telling my daughter, ‘That was your father, and that’s what I did to myself, much less the rest of the world.’”
You can order the latest issue of Metal Hammer and read the full interview at this location.