Elle King admits that, after a video of her performing intoxicated went viral in January, she wasn’t sure her career would ever be the same.

“Try having something bad you did go f–king viral — that was pretty hard,” she says in a new interview with People. “I never thought that a single human being would ever buy a ticket to my show again. But they do.”

• That show was a Grand Ole Opry-mounted tribute to Dolly Parton on her 78th birthday.
• King struggled through the lyrics of Parton’s “Marry Me,” admitted that she was “f–king hammered,” and heckled members of the crowd during her time onstage.
• The Opry subsequently apologized for her language.
• King postponed a slate of shows after the fact.
• Parton herself commented on the situation, urging fans to “forgive” and “forget” and acknowledging that King had “been going through a lot of hard things lately.”

King has since said that she was experiencing “a high level of pain” in her life at the time the show took place. She also alluded to the idea that something like that incident was bound to happen sooner or later due to the course her life was on, and it inspired her to make some changes.

Now, the singer tells People that those changes have made her live show better than it’s ever been. She’s currently out on the road for her 2024 Baby Daddy’s Weekend Tour, a trek scheduled to run through mid-November.

“I felt so afraid to ever have a drink before I go onstage again because I appreciated someone buying tickets to my concert. I wasn’t going to let them down,” King reflects.

“I did let people down that day,” she goes on to say. “And ultimately, I let myself down that day, and I never wanted to feel that way again.

“…I’m definitely able to put on a better show because of some changes that I’ve made in my life, and it gets me more excited,” King relates, adding that she is “the best version of myself now” after months of hard work and healing.

King released a new single, called “High Road,” last week, and she says the song was titled after a phrase that’s been her mantra in recent months. “Since last year, if anything was going wrong or something pissed me off, my manager would say ‘High Road 2024,'” she explains.

“And that was our theme of, like, ‘Take the f–king high road, b–ch. Be the person that you would hope that you could be through any situation,” she adds. “And it’s just been a phrase that we’ve used.”