Chris Stapleton: The Cream Interview

in this week's Scene — on Chris Stapleton's Best Country Album of 2015 candidate Traveller — became quite a process when my voice recorder ate my first interview with the singer. But last week, right smack in the middle of what should of been a serious meltdown, I got to see a show that made the whole mess worth it. While it’s one thing for me to prattle on about how great an artist is, to talk about how instantaneously one reacts to the potency of songs like “Traveller” and “Sometimes I Cry” it’s another thing to witness real live people experience the same thing. Many of them for the first time.

Stapleton was opening up for Eric Church at the 19,000-plus capacity TD Garden in Boston. His set was basically a 40-minute chorus of people getting to their seats and saying something to the effect of, “Shit, we should have gotten here earlier, this guy is awesome.” As he went from a Cannery-sized crowd in a Bridgestone-sized room to a half-full enormodome you could hear him winning over every beer-and-hot-dog-in-hand Eric Church head who walked down the aisle.

Dwarfed by Church’s skate-park-cum-stage set-up, Stapleton and his band managed to make the home of the Boston Celtics feel as intimate as The Station Inn, where the singer's former band, The SteelDrivers, are a longtime fixture. Stapleton’s laid-back demeanor and big, soulful voice met a crowd that was more receptive than rowdy, maybe a little shocked that they had never heard of this dude. By the time singer and band were raging on the blues shouter “Sometimes I Cry," the audience was hooting and hollering like they’d been waiting their whole lives to hear it.

In a city where everything is a competition — especially listening to music — Stapleton won. Or the audience won. Either way, it confirmed all of the hype that I had built up in my head since my very first spin of Traveller. Stapleton made an exceptional record and is poised to be fixture for a long, long time.

So, why not find out what makes him tick before all your friends are like "Dude, have you heard Chris Stapleton? I saw his sold-out Cannery shows (this Friday and Saturday) and it was awwwwesome!" And you get jealous and all that. Luckily for me, Stapleton was gracious enough to give me a do-over on the interview. We deep-dove into Jerry Lee Lewis' take on Percy Sledge classic, tour buses and the hand of fate as it relates to the creation of art and other heady stuff. Check it out after the jump.

I somehow managed to make our conversation explode into digital noise so ...

Well if that's the worst thing that happens today, it will be a good day.

Exactly, exactly, things are going pretty well. How are you doing today?

Busy, but better than I deserve. We flew in from Boston and we're going to New Orleans, so I got to catch my son's little play at school, which I didn't think I was going to be able to make. So that's a good bonus. I'm just enjoying this beautiful day.

I actually got to see your show last night in Boston.

Oh cool.

I gotta say: Congratulations, you killed it.

Aw thanks, we had a good time. You never know how things are going to go. And any time you are the opening act there are a lot of crossed arms, waiting for the person they paid that ticket for. And you just gotta do what you do and hope that somebody is enjoying.

Have you guys played an arena show with that configuration before?

We played with Luke Bryan in someplace like that awhile back. And we've done a few things like that, some of the bigger festivals. But arenas are a different thing because it is like a giant revere tank. In fact, I normally have reverb on my guitar but I just turned it off, used the room.

At the beginning of the show my wife mentioned, "Man, it's like we're in a fish tank."

It's a pretty daunting thing if you've never done it before, but once you settle into it it's like any other shed.

What's up for this weekend, do they have you working?

[[Laughs] We use "they" — I'm laughing at "they." There's always this collective "they," like we're in some sort of forced slavery, some musical slavery. [Laughs] Yeah, "we" have chosen to hop on a bus around 9 this evening, we're going to play Jazz Fest tomorrow. We're going to load in about 5:45 or something in the morning. We're playing the same day as Jerry Lee Lewis. So we get to play a set and then walk over and watch The Killer play a set, which is something I haven't ever got to do.

Oh, you haven't? He's amazing.

I'm a huge fan and so are all the guys in the band are. We've got this one version of Jerry Lee Lewis playing "When a Man Loves a Woman" that might be the greatest thing I ever heard. He completely changes the meaning of "When a Man Loves a Woman." He goes "when a man loves a woman — and you know The Killer loves every damn one of them." [Laughs] If you haven't heard that version of "When a Man Loves a Woman," you need to. ... He completely turns the song into something it was never intended to be. But in his own Jerry Lee Lewis kind of way it becomes cooler.

He's a pretty amazing performer that way. When he played in Nashville a few years ago at Record Store Day ...

At Jack White's thing? The Third Man Place? I didn't go to that and I've been kicking myself.

It was the last time I bought tickets and waited in line for hours and hours and it was totally worth it, the best experience.

Sorry, I'm getting off base here talking about The Killer, we can get back to doing' what we're supposed to be doing.

I don't know, I think talking about The Killer is what we're supposed to be doing.

Absolutely, probably. I feel that way but not everybody feels that way. [laughs]

Let's talk about what you've been listening to lately. What's been on in the van when you're our traveling.

We don't get in van too much these days, try not to. Try to stay on buses if we can.

I don't blame you.

We've been on airplanes. I've been listening to stewardesses tell you how to buckle your seat belt. I've actually been lucky enough that that's what I've been listening to lately. We've been doing that dartboard routing, where you just through darts at a map of the United States of America. Like I said, we were in Boston last night and tomorrow we're going to be in New Orleans. It's basically the worst routing ever but they both came up and I was like, "Yeah let's do 'em."

And I'm sure once the record cycle settles in thing will be more — organized?

Well, it's not that it's not that it's not organized, it's just — when you've been doing it as long as I've been lucky enough to do it — sometimes when things come up that you want to play or you think would be a good place to promote a record you're just like, "Yeah, let's do it." And it makes almost zero sense travel-wise but you just figure it out and you go with it.

Going with the feeling is a thing that gets lost sometimes in the music industry. Everybody gets excited about "release week" and "cross-branding" and stuff and blah blah blah. Sometimes it seems more business-y than musical.

Yes. Some of it's not musical. You know, sometimes it's the things that make the least sense [that] you feel led to do, are the things that make the most sense. Case in point: I decided to take a little trip across the country in that Jeep. I had people telling me it was not a good idea, not because the truck wasn't going to make it but [as a] "what are you doing this for?" kind of thing.

Writer's note: That cross-country Jeep trip was the thematic foundation that inspired Traveller.

To me, wanting to do something or feeling lead to do something is the best reason to do something, particularly in music. That's when you can do something that's not necessarily manufactured or moving with some kind of commercial intent, you are acting out of the right reasons — in life and in music. I think as a culture we tend not to do that. And I try — and I'm as bad as anybody — but I try my best when i feel led to do something, to do it, whether or not it makes sense in other ways. And I always think positive things come out of that for me, musically for sure.

Did it take you a long time to learn to trust your intuition?

Well, I don't know if I trust it! [Laughs] But I certainly enjoy following it. And my wife, I have to give credit where credit is due, she's my Jiminy Cricket that encourages that type of behavior. It's always a positive thing for me, on personal and musical levels, when I'm led to do something to just do it whether it seems to make sense to anyone else.

A quick aside, my wife wanted to know if your wife had a record we could pick up.

No, she does not have a record. But certainly at some point I think we could coax her into doing that.

Well, I'd like to put in a request.

I will let her know that the request has been made.

Cool! Let her know there are two people in Boston that would like to hear a full-length. How is it playing in a band with your wife? I think the power-trio-plus-one set up is awesome, it sounded great last night.

Well thank you. That set up was, once again, one of those things that just kind of happened. I was using the guys from The Jompson Brothers as my country band for a time and we got to a point where, after my dad passed away as part of that soul searching thing, I had to make some musical changes. J.T. Cure, the bass player was kind enough to stay on with me and those guys are dear friends of mine, but I felt like I need to be playing a different kind of music and search for something. So I hired a new band. I got Bard McNamee, the drummer, with me and Steve Hinson playing steel, [and] Jimmy Wallace, he played in great band name 18south, also played in The Wallflowers and that was my band for about two weeks.

Hinson is a big session player, a veteran kinda legendary steel guy, but we like each other and I love to play with him live because I've gotten to do it a few times. And I asked him and he said, "Yeah, I'll give it a shot." And I think he missed some session work and he said, "Man, you know I love ya, but I don't think I can go out on the road anymore," because he's just not doing that anymore more and he's 58, he's older and I love him and we love each other and it's all good but he said, "I'm gonna have to bow out." We were fixin' to go on this other run and Wallace had to bow out the same time.

So I called the other two guys and I said, "Here's the deal, we're now a three piece band as it stands. We can try to get some fill-in guys before the weekend or we can just get together on Wednesday." We got together at Skyline, Paul Worley's little studio and we rented it out for rehearsal cause it's cool little place. And I'd just like to see if we could suffer through me trying to [laughs] cover more ground than I'm used to covering. And we got together than evening and I said, "You know? I think we can make it through the weekend."

Let's just go play and make it through the weekend and we'll look for some other guys. And in the meantime we'll just throw ourselves in the frying pan and play 75, 90 minute sets without rehearsals or anything. And we did that and we had so much fun I kind just stuck with it. It forced me to cover a lot more ground on guitar forced the guys to kind of do the same. And once again that was one of those happy accidents that kind of became the basis of the record, that's the core band. The three of us [producer] Dave [Cobb] would play a little acoustic on the tracking and the other additions were overdubs of steel or harp as needed. The performance part of it, that's the band.

You know, it's just funny how those things work out. Sometimes they feel like panic situations and then it turns out to be the best thing in the world. It definitely forced me to become a better guitar player in some ways — better than I was — forced me to stretch out a little bit, more than I would have in the past. But it's good, all that wound up on the record. In a strange way, those two guys quitting the band helped form that record.

You rarely think of that as a consequence of line-up changes, like, "Oh, we're going to get a record out of this."

When things like that happen I always try to keep that in the back of my mind, because I've had that happen on multiple occasions. Where I'm not sure why I'm doing something or why something happens, musically speaking. Well, in life, too. Well, they're kind of the same thing for me, because that is all that I do, but it always winds somewhere it was supposed to be to start with. So, I always try to keep that in mind when things turn into not what I had planned on [them] being.

That's a pretty good way to just deal things, as they come.

You can find other strengths that you didn't know you had, that were there or you find out how much you need something else. It always becomes a positive experience or a learning experience and you come out the other side of it better.

Well, that seems like the perfect spot to close it out. I'm going to let you go on to New Orleans.

OK. I think we just had a totally different interview than we had the other day.

We did.

I gotta tell you, everything we just went into, this is the only time that's been gotten into. We've been flying around this conversation to parts of this record that haven't been explored. Hopefully it will be something positive to write about. There again, here's this thing that happened — your interview got erased — and we wound up talking about completely different things. And for me, we're talking about a section of this record that really hasn't been explored.

I'm glad I could uncover a little bit, it's weird being one of a hundred journalists talking about the same record.

It's tough for me, as an interviewee, sometimes — and I apologize for this — but you can get robotic in your answers and sometimes you don't get new information. But a lot of that has to come when it comes, I can set out to give new information if the conversation doesn't go that way. It would be a terrible job, I would think, to come up with questions that lead to that. It would be a hard thing. i don't envy that job but thank you for doing [it].