Matthew McConaughey says Janet Jackson inspired him to stop smoking weedv

Matthew McConaughey has shared that a well known track by Janet Jackson inspired him to stop smoking cannabis.

The Oscar winning actor selected the 1993 single for Rolling Stone’s My Life In 10 Songs feature. “What a cool, groovy little tune. It’s also the reason I quit smoking weed,” he said before letting out a sharp laugh. McConaughey explained that he discovered the track “right around the time weed started turning hydroponic,” when the effects had become far more intense and psychedelic.

Looking back on how cannabis had changed, he recalled: “A lot of y’all don’t remember, but weed used to be: you could roll a joint, smoke it, pass it around, everyone giggles, gets the munchies, and maybe runs off and tries to get some snuggle time. Well then it started getting this hydroponic stuff where one toke, the subplots could become unmanageable, and people would implode.”

McConaughey then described the night that convinced him to quit: “I was headed to my own birthday party. We’d taken over the club for my birthday party. I’m gonna drive myself. Before I go, my buddy hands me this joint, he goes, ‘Here, man. Have some of this, super fun.’ I get there, and I take the toke in the car. It was not like the weed I’d smoked before. I listened to Janet Jackson’s ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ 24 times in a row, and when I finally got out of the car to go into my birthday party, no one was in there, ‘cause it was over. They’d all left.”

He finished the story by saying: “I sat in the frickin’ car listening to ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ 24 times because I thought, at the time, that that was more important than going to my own birthday party. Love the song, didn’t love the weed. Still like the tune, though.”

‘That’s The Way Love Goes’ became one of Jackson’s biggest commercial successes and introduced a more mature R&B sound following her earlier pop breakthrough. It remained at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks and climbed to number two on the UK singles chart.

In another recent story, McConaughey explained how mentioning his former screen partner Jennifer Lopez helped him avoid trouble with Mexican border officers.