Chris Stapleton: ‘You Find Out Who You Are Not’
Chris Stapleton is a champion in the world of songwriting and singing, and whenever he performs at an award show, the performance becomes the highlight of the evening.
Chris has written songs for countless other country artists through the years and finally released his own album in 2015. That album, Traveller, went on to win a Grammy for Best Country Album in 2016. Stapleton won a Grammy for Best Country Album in 2018 for Room With A View: Part 1. He has won a total of eight Grammy awards since his debut album was released.
Chris told me in an interview just after he started winning awards that music was the only occupation he wanted in life. He said, “I didn’t like anything else, and I found out a bunch of things that I was not, sold cars and drove an ice truck and went to college and did different things, not in that order, but you know, you find out who you are not.”
He added, “And the thought of doing anything else just made me so miserable I think that really (laughs) kind of steered my path and for better or worse and fortunately for me, it kind of worked out. I’m pretty lucky in that way.”
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Stapleton recently announced details of his next album, Higher, which will be out on November 10. Chris also released the first single from the project, a song called “White Horse,” which he co-wrote with Dan Wilson.
The song was written a decade ago when Dan and Chris were asked to write a song for a movie. However, it didn’t make the final cut of the film.
Stapleton told us, “We were out in Los Angeles; it was about, I think, probably late 2012, early 2013. And there was a movie called ‘The Lone Ranger’ that was coming out. I walked into the room to write to Dan at his house. He said, ‘Hey, they’re looking for songs for this Lone Ranger movie.’ I said, ‘Cool. Let’s write something. What do you know about it?’ He goes, ‘Well, we don’t really know anything.'”
Stapleton continued, “I was like, ‘Well, let’s just make a song that might sound like that.’ And so, that’s kind of where that came from. And we got to talking about how it would be cool to have a kind of rock-driven-western-themed song. That’s kind of where the song came from, and we kind of built it around a guitar riff, really.”
