How Timbaland Stared Down Death, Beat Addiction, and Lost 130 Pounds

Legendary hip hop producer Tim Mosley—you know him as Timbaland—reveals his fitness and mental health secrets.

ON OCCASION, Tim Mosley will pour a glass of merlot, step through the sliding glass doors of his spacious white Miami home onto a patio perched over Biscayne Bay, and, as evening softens the subtropical heat, gaze out over the waves at the horizon. Known to the world as Timbaland, Mosley has earned this vista. For more than two decades, he has helped propel many of this era’s most successful musicians, including Missy Elliott, Beyoncé, Jay- Z, Drake, Rihanna, and Justin Timberlake. In his run as a producer, performer, and label owner, he has thrived in the mercurial world of popular music. Yet he also understands the elusiveness of that shimmering view. 

A few years ago, Mosley was staring into a different kind of emptiness, as the most important things in life—family, finances, and health—tumbled chaotically around him. He almost lost it all, and that threat sparked a renaissance. It’s a journey he’s still on, but it has included years of boxing, dropping more than 100 pounds, and gaining a new perspective. But first he had to kick the drugs.

Looking back, Mosley wonders if the problems weren’t inevitable. “I had to get whipped, because I didn’t appreciate anything,” the 47-year-old says in his syrupy southern lilt. He’s seated at a white stone counter in his kitchen, dressed in gray workout clothes. Mosley, who sports a goatee with a bleached center stripe, looks you in the eye when he talks, searching for signs that you understand what he means. “All my life I felt it was a little too easy.”

It’s true he has known mostly ascent. Success arrived early—working with Missy Elliott straight out of high school in Virginia Beach, then helping to produce Aaliyah’s double-platinum album One in a Million. Accomplishment may have come fast, but Mosley worked hard to keep it up, spending hours in the studio hunched over mixing boards, headphones on, eating vanilla ice cream through the night. 

Unhealthy eating habits aside, the intense focus on the creative part of his life made other areas vulnerable. In 2011, after receiving a prescription for painkillers following a root canal, Mosley started abusing OxyContin and Percocet. Then “my arm started bothering me,” he says, the remnant of an old injury—at 17 he was shot accidentally while working at a Red Lobster. More pain gave him an excuse to ask for more pills.