GentleGIANT
His look reads biker, but country star Chris Stapleton isn’t afraid to get in his feelings
Chris Stapleton didn’t take more than 10 or 15 minutes to write “Maggie’s Song,” a cut from the country star’s new album about a “fuzzy black pup” that he and his wife, Morgane, took home after finding the dog abandoned in a shopping cart in a PetSmart parking lot.
“It’s all true stuff,” Stapleton said the other day. “There’s no embellishment in it.”
Yet recording the song was a different story.
Conceived as a tribute to Maggie after she died last year at age 14, the tender, loping “Maggie’s Song” climaxes on a rainy Monday morning when the dog wakes up and finds she can’t stand. The narrator lies down next to her as she puts “her head on my hand like she’d done so many times,” and if you’re getting choked up just reading the lyrics, imagine how Stapleton felt in the studio.
“That one was hard to sing,” he said, the memory sharp even now. “I kept crying through a lot of it.”
As delivered by this 42-year-old father of five, “Maggie’s Song” vividly exemplifies the complex emotional character of Stapleton’s best music. He’s burly but soft. Tough yet vulnerable. A protector of his loved ones and a man in perpetual search of shelter.
“I’m no authority on masculinity, but I don’t feel un-masculine or embarrassed by having feelings,” he said. “In fact, I think it’s the most manly thing you can do.
“And if somebody wants to say something to me about that,” he said, chuckling again, “we can talk about it outside.”
Stapleton’s gentle- giant vibe helped bring him huge success when
he emerged in 2015 — after years spent playing in bluegrass and Southern rock bands and writing behind the scenes for other Nashville acts — with his quadruple-platinum solo debut, “Traveller.” The LP, which, like all of his music, prominently features Morgane on backing vocals, was named album of the year by the Country Music Association and won a Grammy Award for best country album; his next two records, 2017’s “From a Room: Volume 1” and “Volume 2” — each full of grown-up songs that move beyond infatuation to ponder what happens when love endures — both entered the all-genre Billboard 200 chart at No. 2.
With as much Allman Brothers as George Jones in his blood, the bearded, scratchy- voiced Stapleton was viewed by many at the time as a welcome disruptor of a seemingly endless parade of fresh- faced country bros dispensing glib hits about babes and beer. Some even regarded him as an inheritor of country’s outlaw tradition, though in truth that designation was always an awkward fit for an expert craftsman who’d written No. 1 singles for Luke Bryan and Kenny
Chesney.
Universal Music Group Nashville President Cindy Mabe points out that country music changed in Stapleton’s wake. “Right after ‘Traveller,’ every artist that came to town had a beard,” said Mabe, who oversees Stapleton’s label, Mercury Nashville. “We’d been living in the world of Ken and Barbie, and he brought a realness that maybe hadn’t been there before.”
Today, country’s biggest young male stars are Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen — happily scruffy everydudes whose music similarly balances yearning and brawn. Which means that Stapleton is less a maverick now than a standard-bearer.
On “Starting Over,” which was released on Friday, you can hear him taking advantage of that position to push ever so slightly at the edges of his well established identity. The album contains some of his hardest-rocking material, including several cuts he created with help from his avowed guitar hero, Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. It has a song, “Watch You Burn,” addressed to the perpetrator of the horrific mass shooting that killed 60 people at a Las Vegas country-music festival in 2017 — a rare instance of the normally circumspect Stapleton stepping into the sociopolitical fray of modern American life.
Most gratifyingly, “Starting Over” showcases the extremes of his vocal ability, as in “Cold,” a stately, whisper-to-a-growl R&B ballad filled with pained bent notes and lengthy runs as gritty as they are fluid.
“I love Chris the way I love Otis Redding and Donny Hathaway,” said Pink, who drafted Stapleton for a romantic duet on her 2019 album “Hurts 2B Human” — just one of several pop-star collaborations (along with songs by Justin Timberlake and Ed Sheeran) that Stapleton has been approached to do in recent years. “His soul has been around a lot longer than he has,” Pink added.
Asked how he developed the technique required to expand his natural gift, Stapleton, who grew up in smalltown Kentucky, said he never took vocal lessons but sang along carefully as a teenager to songs by Luther Vandross, Mariah Carey and Bell Biv DeVoe.
Stapleton completed “Starting Over” before the COVID-19 pandemic; in fact, he began work on the album two years ago with sessions near Muscle Shoals, Ala., and at Nashville’s Compass Sound studio.
Eventually, the singer returned to his usual haunt, Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A, where he and his longtime producer, Dave Cobb, made
Stapleton’s previous albums. Does he harbor any superstitions about recreating the circumstances of success, as a ballplayer might by refusing to shave or combing his hair during a championship series?
“Well, if not shaving or combing your hair is superstitious, then I’ve been superstitious for years,” he replied. Then he acknowledged that he hauls around an old dining-room chair from his parents’ house that he likes to sit in when he records. And he’s got a lucky Fender Jazzmaster guitar. And a pocketknife of his father’s that he carries in his pocket.
“Besides all that, though — nah, no superstitions,” he said.
Stapleton introduced a new element into his process by traveling to Los Angeles to write with Campbell, whom he was thrilled to meet when Stapleton opened for Petty and the Heartbreakers at Chicago’s Wrigley Field in 2017.
Among the tunes they finished together was “Arkansas,” about a real-life road trip through the Ozark Mountains that Stapleton and his bass player took after his wife presented him with an Irish- green Porsche 911 for his birthday.
With its heavy twang and snarling tempo, “Arkansas” can evoke the rootsier hair metal of the late 1980s. a comparison that led Stapleton to re
veal that the first concert he ever saw was by Bon Jovi on its tour behind 1988’s “New Jersey.”
Stapleton’s date for that long-ago Bon Jovi show was his dad, and decades later he’s just as tight with his own brood of four sons and a daughter between the ages of 1 and 11. In “Starting Over’s” stirring closer, titled “Nashville, TN,” he reflects on his decision to move from the city to the country to secure some privacy for his family.
He and Morgane wrote the song in 2015 after his star-making performance with Timberlake on that year’s CMA Awards made a tourist attraction of their home.
“All of a sudden there’s a bus with people from four states away showing up in my driveway while I’m trying to play ball with my kids,” he said. “I’m not complaining, but I’d spent 37 years not living in that space. I had to get away from the anxiety of that bus rolling up twice a day.”