Matthew McConaughey has revealed a famous song by Janet Jackson is the reason he stopped smoking weed.

The Oscar winner spoke to Rolling Stone for their feature My Life In 10 Songs, with the 1993 single being included in the list. “What a cool, groovy little tune. It’s also the reason I quit smoking weed,” the actor said, followed by a high-pitched laugh. He explained that he heard the song “right around the time weed started turning hydroponic,” providing a more hallucinatory experience.

“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,” he recalled. “Well then it started getting this hydroponic stuff where one toke, the subplots could become unmanageable, and people would implode.”

“I was headed to my own birthday party,” he continued. “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 concluded: “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 a massive hit for Jackson, signalling a more mature R&B direction to her music after finding fame with lighter pop. The song was number one in the Billboard Hot 100 charts for eight weeks, and reached number two in the UK singles chart.

Recently, McConaughey recalled how name-dropping his former co-star, Jennifer Lopez, got him out of trouble with border police in Mexico.