The United States of Chris Stapleton

"THE UNITED STATES OF CHRIS STAPLETON

In an age rife with division, he's maybe the only thing Americans all agree on. How did a songwriter who never cared much for being famous transcend country music to become one of today's most popular stars?"

Article by Brett Martin
Photographs (including Thumbnail) by Stacy Kranitz

PJ Pat reads and comments on the article.

Chris Stapleton, the modern-day troubadour of country music, has emerged as a powerhouse with his soulful voice and authentic songwriting. Born in Kentucky in 1978, Stapleton's journey from a behind-the-scenes songwriter to a Grammy-winning solo artist is a testament to his undeniable talent. With his gritty vocals and a blend of traditional and contemporary influences, Stapleton has revitalized the country music scene, garnering widespread acclaim for albums like "Traveller." Known for his raw, emotional performances, Stapleton's authenticity resonates with audiences, solidifying his place as a genuine force in the realm of country music, where he effortlessly bridges the gap between classic and modern sounds. As a storyteller through song, Chris Stapleton continues to carve a distinctive path, leaving an enduring impact on the genre.

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Transcript

Hello, all you rock fans, and for this episode in particular, hello to all you country rock fans. This is your humble host, PJ. Pat. Thanks a lot for joining the it's one ladder podcast. I myself aren't particularly a huge fan of country music, but I am a huge fan of Chris Stapleton.

The first time I heard Tennessee Whiskey from this guy, dude, it blew me away. The level of songwriting, his voice, his lyrics, especially for that first album, really floored me. I, in general, was a fan of more like old school country, like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Chris Stapleton really reminds me of that era of country music.

So let's get right into it. Funny enough, this article is coming from the GQ magazine under their culture banner, and I normally read from rock and guitar magazine, so it's really refreshing to read an article from a country rock guy from a GQ mainly known for fashion magazine. Okay, here we go.

Is Chris Stapleton the one thing that America can agree on? How did a songwriter who never cared much for being famous transcend country music to become one of today's most popular stars? Ahead of a new album? GQ's Bret Martin goes road tripping with one of the most reliable hitmakers in music

Bret Martin photographs by Stacy Kranitz

most famous Jeep in Nashville is headed north. It's a 79 Cherokee and an immaculate restoration from gas cap to roof rack. Shiny has a hardshell coffee, candy on the outside, all creamy caramel contours within. The kind of thing that would catch the eye of a certain kind of car geek, of which there seems to be no shortage on the I 65 heading towards the Kentucky state line.

No matter who the driver, for those who pull up alongside to take a look, it might be purely a bonus to find Chris Stapleton, one of the most famous men in country music. Behind the wheel,

crank operated windows are open and so is a road. Wind whips around the tufts of long hair that peek out of Stapleton's baseball cap as he leans back in the driver's seat.

This is what I can call an active driver, he says affectionately of the Jeep, which remains charmingly clap strapped despite a state of the art 392 hemi under the hood. Modern cars have kind of made us numb to the sensation of how fast we're going or, you know, how dangerous the entire act of flying down a road at 60 mph really is.

dangers are soon to be made even more apparent. We're headed to the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green. Stapleton's plan being to spend a rare off day on the racetrack there with a z or z from my American friend's, six supercar.

Sneaking in moments like this can be tough. Been hitting it pretty heavy since 2015. Stapleton says his All American roadshore Tour, a showcase of his genre straddling brand of stadium, rock and country, has been crisscrossing the nation since 2017. Recently, that meant squeezing a bunch of postponed pandemic shows into the already busy schedule. Was kind of a logistical nightmare, a lot of the hard long runs for bus drivers and production people, Stapleton says. The Roadshow was an unyielding beast, traveling with eight tour buses, 1018 wheelers and a staff of 65, not including local support in a diverse roster of opening acts. Not Beyonce or Taylor Swift, it's a sizable operation. Myriad other priorities compete for mindspace these days. Stapleton is preparing to release a new album, Higher in November. Also raising five kids with his wife and creative partner Morgan, three of them boys under six. Wow, that's crazy. Boys are kind of cavemen until they're 17, he says, sighing. That's pretty accurate. You're just trying to make sure everybody doesn't get killed. So today is a day to get out of the town, yield to wild hair indulge one's prerogative as a rich and famous man to drive an absurdly high performance car around a racetrack at video game speeds.

For now, we truck along unhurriedly in the middle lane.

Jeep Cherokee is a key part of Stapleton's origin story. Vehicle that literally started him down the road to superstardom years ago. Shortly after the death of Stapleton's father, morgan found the Jeep in Phoenix and bought it for $10,000. Fly out there and then road trip home to Tennessee. Something to shake off the fog of grief. Stapleton was 37 then. Was a well established writer of songs for other people and had met with some success as the lead singer of the bluegrass band Steel Drivers, but had found little traction with his own recording career. If nothing changed by 40, he thought privately he would hang up his solo aspirations and stick to writing. On the drive from Phoenix, he wrote a song called Traveler, which became the title track of his 2015 debut album, a work for which nobody had much commercial hope until the moment it won Album of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards that same night.

Stapleton also bagged awards for new artist and Male Vocalist of the Year. Traveler became Billboard's number one country album for 2016 and 2017, when it was joined in the number two spot by Stapleton's follow up from a Room Volume One. Was eventually certified six times platinum and notch achievements many fans may be unaware exists. Its breakout single, Tennessee Whiskey, scored two successive Tuney Awards for most played song on Waffle House jukeboxes nationwide. Really? That's cool. The back of the Cherokee is a fixed a Waffle House license plate holder commemorating the milestone. Man so he hit a big late. I mean, 37 is actually really late for an artist to hit a big, right?

that's really impressive.

Proves you put the hard work in, you have the talent to back it up. A lot of things could happen, no matter what your age. Way to go, Chris. It's an old story by now, but Nashville loves a legend in whatever string Stapleton plucked in, the American consciousness continues to vibrate. The three albums that followed Traveler all went platinum. Stapleton won Grammys and then won more Grammys. He sang the national anthem at this year's Super Bowl. He has become the rarest of the rare 21st century phenomenons. A monocultural star at once deeply embedded in country music. Slippling through the raindrops of the genre's many factions, divisions and culture wars, albeit by not saying much about them, a collaborator with everybody from Adele and Pink to Jesse Timberlake to Joy Oladokin.

sure who he or she is. Radio listeners, Americana heads, bros, traditionalists neo, traditionalists, optimists, critics, crowds all claim some part of Stapleton's as their own. Wow, he really does appeal to everybody. This May, a photo went viral of Stapleton after the Academy of Country Music Awards, seemingly helping to clean up fallen confetti with a leaf blower.

Stapleton quickly did his best to debunk the idea that he was pitching in on cleanup duty. But viruses seek a hospitable host. Somehow, his honesty about not sticking around to clean the stadium floor only served to confirm that he was exactly the kind of guy who would stick around to clean the stadium floor.

You just can't stop a man on a hot streak. Motorcyclist pulls up alongside the Cherokee and flashes a thumbs up before zooming off down the road. Just one more reminder that in this world driven by division and hate, one thing is clear everybody loves Chris. The command center of Stapleton Nation lies camouflaged in a signless warehouse about ten minutes off Music Row.

Behind its draft facade is a hallucination of a man cave. Stapleton and his team moved in during the pandemic, creating a combination office rehearsal, performance space and dream clubhouse. Japanese globe lights hang overhead. There are reconfigurable sitting areas stacked with books and guitars. There's a pool table, vintage jute boxes, a rack of expensive bourbon, a side table with these three Grammys on it.

The Jeep Cherokee is parked here today, along with the truck at Bigot

Custom Traveler edition, which looks like it could eat the older vehicle for breakfast.

Also owns a Tesla Model S and a Corvette Z Six. Against one wall are towering stacks of music gear, old and new, and other assorted memorabilia. Some items, like a large carved wooden eagle, are gifts from grateful concert venues. Stapleton returns from tour as laden with tributes as a present from a state visit. Are products of a deep collector's compulsion. Scouring local music shops, antique stores and online marketplaces is one of his primary methods of killing time on a road. My version of hunting, he says. Sometimes you strike out and you're just like, well, this isn't what I thought I was walking into, but that's fine too. He likes stuff that has ghosts, quote unquote, like a 1920s Steinway upright piano we found somewhere in Pennsylvania and made room for on one of the tour trucks. Crew hates me for a day and then we're cool. Or a vintage Ludwig drumstick display now being used as a makeshift wine rack. Or a travel case with Willie Nelson quote unquote, stenciled on the side. Feel like you can pull those ghosts into what you're doing. It's like meeting the older guys and soaking up as much as you can, Stapleton says. Years on from his breakthrough, he seems to still get a day's kick out of proximity to such legends. He takes self deprecating glee in recounting a story of playing a show outside Memphis and being invited to visit Jerry Lee Lewis, lived nearby. We were all stoked, so we go over there, sit down in the living room, and there's no Jerry Lee. Lewis's wife informed them that the great man did not feel well and had retreated to his bedroom. We hang out for a minute and his wife gives us cookies and grape propel water, he never comes out. He was a no show in his own house.

They were leaving, Lewis's wife gave Stapleton a copy of Lewis's memoir. He obviously pre signed it in one color, then he wrote a note in another color Chris, god bless Jerry Lee. Except it was a picture of him and he circled the word God and drew an arrow to himself.

Stapleton lets out a cackle. Hilarious. It is easy to spend a lot of time watching Stapleton on video or looking at him in photos and only later realize that you don't have a very clear picture of his face. Not hidden in the shadows of a cowboy hat, it is often covered by sunglasses, curtains of hair and beard may be classic outlaw trappings, but they can also leave you with the impression of a cartoon dog doing his best to hide inside a haystack. In person, his face is brighter and more boyish than brooding, his eyes quicker to light up in amusement. Seems like a naturally friendly guy who has had to learn to be more guarded. There's some hard stuff in there, too. He bristles when pushed to talk about anything he doesn't want to, politics especially, and he knows how to hold a grudge. He's still irritated by the time, long before fame hit, when he was passed over two weeks in a row at the Bluebird Cafe's famous open mic night.

But he is at ease in his space and eager to geek out over, say, the difficulty of finding Russian made parts for old tube amps. So much so that Morgan has to gently but firmly interrupt to summon him to lunch with her and three or four members of their professional team gather around a long table and split up plates from Mexican restaurant named Pancho and Lefty's Cantina. Naturally, the group is buzzing from a trip to see Beyonce's Renaissance World Tour in Atlanta the night before. It's a big show, there's dancers and explosions, all those things, but at the core of it, it's just her singing her ass off, Stapleton says. Assiduously picking onions off of a taco salad. At some point we hit a wall and it was just like, how is she still going? Mergaine says. She was conserving energy, Stapleton says in a tone of professional admiration. Could see when she would recharge be singing and not doing all the energy stuff, and then go back to doing the high energy stuff. She's my barometer on songs, he says to his wife. Morgan, even if your wife wasn't heavily involved in your career, you don't want to sing things that your wife hates.

Spoken like a guy that knows what's going on. Let me ask you as a singer, Morgan says, is singing not energy? Perhaps that even the appearance of diminishing Beyonce's performance will yield nothing good, Stapleton lets it drop. He muses on the video content the show used during Beyonce's costume changes. We can do that for my show. Get me nearly naked on a bare skin rug. Ask whether he actually makes any costume changes on stage. No, not at all, he says. A dry shirt might be nice, says Morgan, who spends every show standing about 5ft from her husband, tambourine in hand. Let me tell you, during a hot show, I would love a dry shirt. Stapleton agrees. The Stapletons met while working at neighboring music publishing companies on Music Row has become in every way his creative partner. He speaks about his career, is most often in the first person plural. The 14 songs on hire, she sings background on ten, often following her husband's vocal so closely that the effect would be double tracking. Wow, that's cool. Even know it was his wife singing is also a producer on the album and, has been true throughout his career, had a large hand in choosing which songs from Stapleton's huge catalog made the cut. The road trip he and I take to Bowling Green lasts about three and a half hours later, neither he nor Morgan will be able to remember the last time they were more than a few feet apart for that long.

Most of the people around the table go back to what they still refer to as the before times, quote unquote. That means before. November 4, 2015, the Night Traveler scored its upset wins at the CMAs. And perhaps more important, Stapleton performed an epic duet with Justin Timberlake. It was Morgan's idea to ask Timberlake to perform. It hadn't been that long since Stapleton had been the entertainer at timberlake's birthday party. Her hunch paid off beyond all imagination. Not only said yes, but demanded a lengthy eight minute slot that crossed over the top of an hour. To maximize viewers, the two performed Stapleton's soul soaked version of Tennessee Whiskey and Timberlake's Drink You Away, a match that suddenly seemed preordained. By the next morning, Stapleton was somehow simultaneously the savior of country and its biggest crossover star.

Also, every show on his upcoming tour was sold out. The CMA performance remains electric. To watch a bolt of lightning amid the fog of bro country quote unquote

good looking dudes singing about a handful of cliched country tropes beer trucks, girls and the style that owed mortar, rap, rock and mainstream popped into Hank Williams that dominated at the time. That's what I was talking about earlier, chris Stapleton, when he came out with his album, he had just like it harkened back to the Hank, William and the old school of country days.

And you immediately saw that and you merely were drawn to that

As Timberlake and Stapleton traded verses, the show's director increasingly cuts to the crowd, which seems to be emerging in stages from a deep slumber. This culminates in a shot of Dobroist Jerry Douglas wearing a look that approximates someone gazing upon the burning bush. The clip is also instructive about two very different types of charisma. Timberlake is all whoops and spins and seductive slips and slides. Stapleton's energy is more rooted, almost inward facing, as if content to wait for the crowd to come to him.

JT is a leaping flame, Stapleton is a glowing coal. Reminded of this as a conversation at lunch drifts around the table.

Rare is a celebrity who seems to need it quite as little as Stapleton does.

I'd be lying if I said that I don't like going out and playing a show to a full house of people, especially when you've played for no people. That's the drug, he says. But to be famous for the sake of being famous, that was never the main want. It is crucial to Stapleton's story, to the creative decisions he's been able to make, to the kind of celebrity he has become, and to the seemingly universal goodwill he's managed to maintain at the quote unquote main wants. He came to Nashville for was not to be a star, but to be a writer.

Jeep Cherokee slides across the state line into Kentucky. Stapleton's. Homeland. There's nothing that says you need to be from anywhere in particular to make country music. Other things being equal, though, the 100 miles radius around Staffordsville, where Stapleton grew up, is a pretty good choice. Where Route 23 winds through eastern Kentucky passing through or by towns like Olive Hill in parentheses, Tom T, Hall, Ashland in parentheses, Naomi and Weino, judge Cordell where Ricky Skaggs is van Lear,

Lynn Flatwoods, billy Ray Cyrus Paintsville, Tyler Childers

Pikeville, dwight Yokum and Patty Loveless to name just a few. A disproportionate of talent perhaps only matched by the Mississippi Delta or the Trem neighborhood of New Orleans. That is not to say that Stapleton's childhood was drenched in mandolin and sepia. He barely encountered bluegrass until his 20s. He would go on to be nominated with the Steel Drivers for the Grammy for best bluegrass album. He was worried that his childhood was insufficiently dramatic to be a great artist. His favorite album was and remains, Tom Petty's Wildflowers. His first concert was Bon Jovi. His father, a mining engineer, played outlaw country and old R B. You distill down those influences, I don't think that my music doesn't make sense. Indeed, they read like a chemical formula. In high school, Stapleton played football, baseball, basketball and whatever else the athletic department threw at him. He was also class valedictorian. Unsure what was next, he headed to college at Vanderbilt in Nashville, thinking to follow in his father's engineering footsteps. But once he'd arrived in the country music mecca, he caught wind of a different path. The notion of writing songs was not foreign to me. What was foreign to me was learning that when George Strait sang a song, he didn't necessarily write it, he says. When I found out that there was this golden job where someone would pay you to sit down in a room and make up songs, I thought, man, that's the greatest job in the world. Dropped out of school and moved back to eastern Kentucky, he began nibbling at the edges of his new world. Was just a snowball effect of meeting good people, he says. Some people have opposite stories where they meet really not good people. The good thing for me is that I didn't have enough money to scam. So they either wanted to work with me based on what they heard, or they didn't. He came to Nashville in a Nissan Maxima holding a duffel bag of clothes, a guitar, a digital recorder and a kitchen chair taken from his parents house, which he still carries around to sit on when recording. He was 23. Man, the balls it took to do that, right?

Drop out of school and just go for it. Following your dreams like that. How many people do you know that actually do that? Or did that, right? It's pretty inspiring to read stories like this, especially someone who's made it like this. Now, I know there's a million and one chances, but it's still inspiring nonetheless to read stuff like this.

The country music business has long run on the system of songwriting, in which writers get together for formalized writing sessions. I don't want to use the word factory, but it's very much a workman's approach, Stapleton says. you show up every day at a set time with a goal that in three to 5 hours you'll have a finished song. It's not a system that allows for periods of writer's block. You'll learn how to turn it on, even if it's not the best version of you to say, now is the time to work. And the great thing about co writing is that the day you don't feel like doing anything, your co writer is probably going to be on fire. Stick your lightning rod up in the air and you're like, all right, know where we're at now. Stapleton was offered a contract with a publishing company four days after arriving back in Nashville. All but unheard of timeline, quickly gained a reputation as both a versatile talent and a workhorse, regularly scheduling three writing sessions per day where most writers topped out at one. Loved it. I still love it. I wouldn't have the stamina for three a day now, but it was a dream gig, and you're a contractor. Essentially, it's a performance based job. Law of averages told me that if I wrote more songs, I'd have more opportunities for success, in the meantime, I was educating myself on how to do it. Stapletham has become a scholar of the method. Some rooms you go into where you have to operate primarily as a lyricist, because the other people have the other stuff covered. Or sometimes you're the music guy, the other people are doing the lyrics.

A lot of the times there's a track already built. Have to just be able to identify who you are in a room at that time. He has learned not to take inspiration for granted. I used to believe that if a song was good, he'd remember it. If he didn't, it probably wasn't worth it in the first place. Then one day I had something that was really cool and I forgot it, he says, lingering in his voice. Was like, I can't get it back. Couldn't get it back. It was gone. Now his phone is filled with notes and brief audio snippets

pull over to record or jot an idea down.

the past few years, his tour's backstage setup has included a shadow set of instruments used to warm up and rehearse, but also to record on should inspiration strike. The song cold from starting over was born in that way.

₩1 a Grammy, Stapleton notes dryly, so you know it was worth having to set up. By 2015, Stapleton had written or co written hits for George Strait, Alan Jackson, Cheryl Crowe, Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney and dozens of others.

all the time, like a swordsman fighting left handed, stapleton had that voice in his back pocket. Actually, it was something of an open secret

the time he got around to Traveler, most of Nashville had heard Stapleton's voice in one place or another. As a singer for the Steel Drivers, which grew out of an informal bluegrass jam session his frequent writing partner, Mike Henderson, organized.

would come in to sing a song, and he would know the song.

would nail it on the first take, then he'd go back and put the harmonies on it, and it'd be done in 15 minutes, Henderson told me.

who was 70, died in his sleep on September 22.

Just as it had once surprised Stapleton to learn that a singer might not write their own songs, it never occurred to him that a songwriter wouldn't also sing. Such is the privilege of those born with a voice like his, alternately thick with sand or clear as a chime, capable of all the athleticism required.

In the era of TV talent show pipes worship

Chris Stapleton win? The Voice is a very popular Google search,

also an uncommon delicacy.

late music writer Pete Cooper told a story about the guitar being passed around at a party filled with famous musicians,

leanne Womack elbowing him in the ribs and whispering, listen to this. When Stapleton took his turn,

bluegrass innovator Ricky Skaggs remembers sitting on his tour bus at a festival and sliding the screen door open to better hear the Voice drifting over from a distant stage. It was like nothing he'd heard in bluegrass, he says.

was like he could do anything and everything.

was everybody's behind the scenes favorite, says Steel Drivers fiddle player's Tammy Rogers.

all that, an album he produced for Universal Nashville was met with a lukewarm reception at the label, which saw a few prospects for it on a notoriously narrow and data driven world of country radio.

was said that he tested poorly among young female listeners despite having written a monster bro country hit in Luke Bryant's Drink a Beer.

he saw the obstacles.

mean, you show a picture of a young cat and then a 37 year old guy who looks like he came off the Beverly Hillbillies, I see how that makes sense, he says.

one radio single he did released failed to make an impression.

he approached new leadership at Universal and asked for a last chance.

said, the radio thing isn't working out for me. Would you mind if I just made a record and went out and played live? Because that's what I know how to do. Just let me do that,

I think I'll be okay

produce. He tapped Dave Cobb, whose work with Sturgill Simpson he admired.

recorded Traveler in a week. Wow, one week for such a crazy, groundbreaking album. For him,

goal was to sell 20,000 copies, enough to be able to make another record by summer. A combination of Stapleton's live performances and a well industry goodwill had begun to build word of mouth about the album.

era of streaming domination was still around the corner, but Traveler was proving an early example of how an artist could drive outside the hegemony of country radio.

early September, the CMA nominations were announced. As Morgan Stapleton puts it, Things were definitely ramping up, but nobody could see November coming. When we arrive at the track, there's a multicolored row of Corvettes waiting at the NCM Motorsports Park, glittering like gumballs on a sunblasted concrete. It looks like you might get a four pack of them in a parting gift, though at a starting price of $140,000, that is not likely.

Stapleton's own Z 106 has too few miles on it to really open up yet,

we're buying a bright red number for a few spins around the track. Wash the brakes until they warm up, the man in the charge advises genially.

take your molars out. The engine occupies a space that in a normal car, would be the backseat. It growls up against our backs. I'm not a daredevil, Stapleton reassures me as we ease up behind a lead car. Soon we're whipping around a 3.15 miles course, hitting a cool 135 on the straightaways.

something almost primal about that sound, Stapleton says. You know, a good electric guitar is kind of the same thing. You make these sounds,

can get very violent, very aggressive.

can hear that aggression on White Horse, the first single from the new album Higher, a good reminder of that Bon Jovi concert a young Chris Stapleton attended.

not much else like White House on the album, but then the record is Stapleton's most eclectic and boundary pushing yet. The opening track. What am I going to do? Written with Miranda Lambert, is a slight entry into country music's ever expanding taxonomy of human heartbreak, in this case, nailing a vivid interlude somewhere past acceptance but pre peace.

Further on, there's a solid trucker anthem and at least two songs that you can instantly imagine a generation of wedding montage videos being set to, including The Wildflowers Infected Trust.

the pulsing Heart of Hire is a bedroom suite of four songs that lean straight into pure R B.

Stapleton is a soul singer in a cowboy hat has been his not so secret code ever since Tennessee Whiskey.

he goes. Full smolder invoking. Robert Clay, Al Green, Sam Cook and more. He is almost bashful about the quiet storm of it all.

do these things with your wife's permission, he says.

raises the question of whether he's ever considered making a straight soul record.

don't know that I would consider making a straight anything, he says.

it was all just bedroom songs or all rocking songs with those horse metaphors or whatever,

wouldn't feel interesting to me. It wouldn't feel representative of everything I enjoy or think that people want to hear.

cynical minded might suggest. That the eclecticism of hire is a canny move to hit as many fan pleasing notes as possible.

will see it as a genuine product of a searching creative mind.

you might reflect that a great blessing bestowed on certain artists at certain times is a state of having both things being true at once.

the pandemic, the Stapletons began going to therapy together.

was a way to kind of help us navigate what the world was, what that meant to our family, to our business, he says. He's been outspoken about erasing his stigma of seeking such help and is hard not to spot the mark of introspection across Higher.

bottom is a monologue of alcoholic self delusion.

he were to generate a word cloud of Stapleton lyrics, whiskey would loom large.

preshow ritual once involved a shot of tequila. Now he performs exercises prescribed by a voice coach and has been all but sober for several years.

didn't have to go to rehab, but from a 45 year old man health perspective, a doctor is going to look at me and go, hey, man, probably cut out the drinking. And I'd be like, okay, cool.

like to tell people that I got into a drinking contest with myself in my twenty s and I lost, he says. Certainly he was not the first aspiring country musician to believe that self destruction was a prerequisite to credibility.

you're younger, you feel like you have to do certain things in order to occupy some of these spaces, to make yourself feel like you're legit.

want to feel things, you want to be able to write about things authentically, he says. If somebody working a different kind of job drank themselves to death in the name of being better at that job, it wouldn't make sense to anybody.

wouldn't say,

he must have been the greatest electrician to ever lived. We're pointed back to south, now toward Tennessee.

Cherokee clops along like a comfy old horse after the jet engine of the Corvette. As a white line ticks by under the front left tire,

higher ends on just this image in the song Mountains of My Mind, stapleton, alone with an acoustic guitar, sings about escaping somewhere where no one knows me, where no one even cares. Bourgeain Stapleton spent the recording of Mountains of My Mind curled up under the control room soundboard, sobbing.

I still haven't heard it without crying, she says.

like, well, that's how I know it's good. Stapleton says.

thing you need to know about my wife is that she likes super sad songs.

sentiment of Mountain on My Mind is real at least part of the time. Everybody has some version of that, just I want to get the fuck out of here. I've had enough. I don't want to be whoever I'm supposed to be today.

it's a mother raising kids or somebody getting older and lonely, he says.

anybody who's been in the position where

anybody who's been in the position wherein has some kind of impostor syndrome

start to not feel like a real person. You know what I'm saying? You start to understand when you see guys talk about themselves in a third person.

reason they do that, I believe, is that they're not really talking about themselves. They're talking about whatever the thing is of themselves that people want to purchase or go see.

is no more dangerous word in country music than authenticity. A labyrinth, a false flag, a cudgel, a trap, not to mention a marketing plan.

I mean something different when I nevertheless propose that something authentic helps account for the seemingly universal response Stapleton provokes in people.

the cowboy hats or the hair, not even the voice or the songs. Though maybe they should be enough. Maybe. In his world of griffs scams putons focus groups and constructed identities.

are like insects who have evolved new sensory organs. Nascent antenna designed to cut through the merck and recognize a thin, fragile signal of something, anything that feels real.

something heartening in the fact that such an instinct even survives in these times that if America is going to agree to go gaga for anybody, it's still sometimes a guy who's worked hard, acted decently, followed his own counsel and hasn't yet started referring himself in a third person.

if it comes to it, there are ways that a man in his position can make himself disappear.

a Garth Brooks and vanish into a concocted. Chris Gaines, for instance.

shave. Though it doesn't seem we're in imminent danger of losing our great unifier. If I shave, it means I'm retiring. You snorts,

I don't think I'm bored enough with myself just yet. Thank Jesus for that. Chris Stapleton,

that concludes the article. I hope you really enjoyed that. I certainly did.

out to me on social media at

Forget. Crank it out one louder and I'll see you on the next episode.