Dennis Quaid Says Faith Saved Him After Addiction: 'I'm Grateful to Still Be Here' (Exclusive)

Dennis Quaid has relied on his faith during the toughest of times. 

“I'm grateful to still be here, I'm grateful to be alive really every day,” the actor and musician, 69, tells PEOPLE in this week's cover story. “It's important to really enjoy your ride in life as much as you can, because there's a lot of challenges and stuff to knock it down.”

For Quaid, those challenges included past struggles with addiction. After making a name for himself as one of Hollywood’s most versatile stars in 1979’s Breaking Away, 1983’s The Right Stuff, 1989’s Great Balls of Fire! and more, Quaid checked himself into rehab — or as he refers to it in this week’s issue of PEOPLE, “cocaine school.”

“I remember going home and having kind of a white light experience that I saw myself either dead or in jail or losing everything I had, and I didn't want that,” he recalls. 

“I was in a band,” he adds, “and we got a record gig… They broke up the night they got it, and they broke up because of me, because I was not reliable.”

What saved the Houston, Texas native was returning to his Christian roots. Addiction forces people “to fill a hole inside us,” Quaid explains. “When you're done with the addiction, you need something to fill that hole, something that really works, right?” 

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In 1990, he wrote the faith-based song “On My Way to Heaven” for his mother Juanita — “to let her know I was okay, because I wasn't okay before then,” he remembers. And he began rereading the Bible, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and other religious texts. 

“That's when I started developing a personal relationship,” he says. “Before that, I didn't have one, even though I grew up as a Christian.”

Now the father of three is releasing a new album called Fallen: A Gospel Record For Sinners.

“I grew up at the Baptist church; I love the hymns that I remember from being a kid,” he says. “The songs are self-reflective and self-examining, not churchy. All of us have a relationship with God, whether you’re a Christian or not.”

It's part of a very busy year of projects for Quaid (who spoke to PEOPLE before the Hollywood actors' strike). His films and TV shows include the Max limited series Full Circle, the sports drama The Hill, the animated comedy Strays, an upcoming biopic in which he stars as Ronald Reagan, and Lawmen: Bass Reeves, a Paramount+ series from Yellowstone’s Taylor Sheridan.

Married to Laura Savoie, 30, since 2020, he's the proud dad of actor Jack Quaid, 31 (with ex Meg Ryan) and twins Thomas and Zoe, 15 (with ex Kimberly Buffington). "I'm the happiest I've ever been," he says.

When asked how his addiction issues shaped the man he is today, Quaid pauses to reflect. “It's a struggle,” he says. “We're all looking for the joy of life, and drugs give that to you and alcohol and whatever it is for anybody give that to you really quick. Then they're fun and then they're fun with problems, and then they're just problems after a while. That's really what we're looking for, the joy of life, which is our gift, actually, the relationship with God that we all have. It's at the bottom of it, the joy of being alive.”

Achieving sobriety, he adds, “was about getting back to that.”

For more on Dennis Quaid's journey, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.