You’re here for the ghost story, and I promise I will deliver it to you. But first, I need to explain why I’m in the “Serenity Room” of a Manhattan office building—complete with pictures of trees covering the walls and a non-functioning rock-garden waterfall—to meet Scott Stapp, lead singer of gospel-tinged butt rock titans Creed.

You haven’t heard much from Scott Stapp lately, and that’s by design—some his design, but most of it likely your own. Though he still speaks of Creed as if it's an active band, it hasn't recorded anything since reuniting in 2009, and you have probably not sought out the man’s solo material in the interim. Rather, your most recent memory of Stapp probably involves one of his many, many public breakdowns. There was the time in 2002 his bandmates fired him for showing up high to a show and performing entirely on the floor, on his back. There was the time he got into a brawl with 311 in 2005. There was the time he attempted suicide by jumping off a balcony at the Delano Hotel in Miami and was rescued by rapper T.I. (who did not know who Stapp was at the time) in 2006. And there was the time, in 2014, he believed he worked for the CIA and had to kill President Obama (he did not succeed). Thanks to a terrible mix of depression, addiction (both drugs and alcohol), and fame-induced megalomania, Stapp spent the better part of this century in free fall, smashing through floor after floor.

Stapp claims to be a changed man now. I know this because he has a new song called “Changed Man,” which has a chorus that goes, “I’m a changed man.” It's from the record he made with “supergroup” Art of Anarchy (featuring former GNR guitarist Bumblefoot, not Buckethead—different former GNR guitarist, different body part). But he’s here, today, in the Serenity Room, not just to sell me on the album, but to sell me—and through me, the world—on his commitment to sobriety. He wants you to know that he is fine. Or, as fine as he can be at the moment.

He still looks like Scott Stapp when he walks into a room. Silver earrings, the granite chin, and his old Creed hairdo, which is best described as “Journey guy getting out of a pool.” When he arrives, he reaches into a small bag and makes a polite request.

“I’m gonna vape so long as you don’t write about it. If you write about it, I’m not gonna vape.”

“I will definitely write about it.”

“Then I won’t. I don’t wanna promote it.”

“Okay.”

He ruefully keeps his vape pen tucked away and sits down beside me. His last major public breakdown came in 2014, when his wife Jaclyn filed for divorce and claimed in court papers that he had threatened to kill her and their children. TMZ published audio of a paranoid 911 call he made from his car, where he expressed a belief that people were out to murder him. He has not been in the news since, his obscurity being the most convincing proof of his ongoing rehabilitation.

“I’d been trying to get sober since 2007 and couldn’t go six to nine months without a huge relapse that, for some reason, always ended up public.”

So what’s different about this run of sobriety, then?

“With the bottom I hit this last time, almost losing my wife and family… the public humiliation that came with it really broke me, man, and shattered me," he says very quietly. "It humiliated my family."

"My oldest (son Jagger, 19) was definitely impacted and humiliated at school and so I have tremendous regret for that and can’t imagine how he must have felt.”

Did he let you know he was embarrassed?

“Definitely.”

By Stapp’s count, he has been sober now for two years, three months, and 29 days. (We met in mid-March.) He went to all the rehab joints: The Summit in Malibu, Eric Clapton’s Sober Home, you name it. His wife Jaclyn—who never saw that divorce through and has stayed with Stapp for 11 long, hard years—chaperones him almost everywhere now. She also helps handle his affairs, hence the reason Scott refers to her as the Sharon to his Ozzy. He eats right, goes on long runs, attends AA meetings five days a week, and is now fluent in addict-ese, speaking in all the clichés that recovering alcoholics use—about taking it one day at a time, etc.—because they know them to be ineffably true.