See all our 16th Annual Country Music Critics' Poll coverage: the full list of results, select factoids from the results, our interview with Chris Stapleton, our feature about how Stapleton and Jason Isbell triumphed without country radio and our critics' comments.
Sitting at a small table nursing a cup of coffee, Chris Stapleton blends in with the rest of the blue-collar diners at Charlotte Avenue meat-and-three Wendell Smith's Restaurant, where the singer raves about the lima beans. It's reasonable to assume that some of this lunch crowd caught Stapleton trading verses with Justin Timberlake for eight minutes on the CMA Awards back in November.
Or perhaps some of them watched him sing his heart out on Saturday Night Live the previous weekend. A few may even be among the more than 700,000 music fans who, in the wake of that CMA performance, purchased the veteran songwriter and former SteelDrivers singer's breakout solo debut Traveller, currently up for an Album of the Year Grammy.
And yet nobody in the eatery seems to recognize the singer — not that he's particularly interested in being a pop star.
While critics agree that Stapleton's literally overnight success is changing the trajectory of modern country music, ushering in a new era of commercially viable substance, success isn't changing the man himself. When his ship came in, and the singer started booking bigger venues — he headlines an instantly sold-out three-night stand at the Ryman next month — his accountant called with the question you'd ask any breakout star: What are you going to do for production?
Stapleton's answer: "Nothing."
"I think it would be radical to have this little, tiny stage that only fits the band," Stapleton tells the Scene, explaining his dream setup. "The audience can get as close to you as they want to get, on the floor, and not a lot of bells and whistles, and [we] just walk out there and play music. I think that would be a radical thing to do in an arena-type setting. I think if I went and saw that, it would blow my mind."
He took the same uncomplicated, meat-and-potatoes approach recording Traveller with Americana super-producer Dave Cobb. Given the record's success, it's hard to see why he'd change things up even if he wanted to.
"I think if you can restore humanity to music, humanness. I like human interaction better than I like anything that looks perfect on a grid," he says.
Let's talk about the CMA Awards performance. It's this eight minutes that's been seen as this instant watershed moment for country music, and obviously it was a career-making moment for you, I think anyone would agree. Waking up that morning, did you have a sense that this was going to be a life-changing night?
[Pause] No. I thought it would be really [interesting]. I was excited to get to play music. We'd spent a couple days rehearsing what we were going to do and felt really confident that we were going to have a good time. You know, it's kind of a dangerous thing, in my mind, to collaborate with somebody [Justin Timberlake] so far out of country music, but not dangerous in that he's great [laughs]. And he's a great musician and a great guy and we're friends, and that made it comfortable as can be.
How long have the two of you known each other?
A couple, three years, something like that.
Where do you two connect musically?
Well, it's all just the blues, man. Whether you want to throw drum loops under it or banjos on it, it's all just the blues, or soul music, and so much of music all has the same origin. It just kind of splinters off and goes somewhere else. So when you try to bring things that are seemingly opposing forces, stick them on a stage together, it's not as crazy as it sounds. ... We just wanted to be guys getting onstage. You know, Justin's perfectly capable of doing large productions with lasers and dancers and all that kind of stuff, but we both sat down and talked about it and [said], "Let's get down there and play."
What is your memory of being onstage? Do you remember what was going through your head? Could you feel that energy in the room?
Yeah. About halfway in, like, "Cool, people aren't going to throw anything at us. That's good." And [the crowd] all really seemed to enjoy it, and we got offstage and all the musicians — my band and [Justin's] band — all felt like we did a good job. ... We felt like we did it as well as we could have done it.
And of course, there was winning the awards too.
Yeah! Nobody, including me, I don't think really had any expectation of that. So that amplified things in a way that created this thing. That mixed with the performance — it was one of those stars-lining-up-at-that-moment that you get maybe once in a career, but they can also turn on so many other cool things that you couldn't do [before].
Do you remember what it was like waking up the next morning to the world talking about it?
Well, I wouldn't say I woke up the next morning, I was still sleeping in [laughs]. But yeah, it was all very — and my wife gets sick of me using this word, but it's the only word for it — surreal, kind of like, "Hey, did that really happen to me last night? Did we win the three awards and get up with the biggest pop star in the world and play eight minutes on a television show in front of millions and millions of people? Yeah, we did that, OK! Was that me?" We didn't know. I don't think anybody else did either until record sales the next week, and then that sparks more conversations, and that creates more opportunities, and all of the sudden it's whatever it's become right now. And we're still figuring that out.
Was there a point that it really hit you, that you had broken through to this other level?
Yeah, the No. 1 on the Billboard 200 two weeks in a row hits you pretty good.
And you've had chart success in the background as a songwriter.
Not like that. The Billboard 200 is everybody. I mean, I've had country hits and I've had an album cut [on an Adele record] and things in and out of the pop world, but nothing like that. So, yeah, it was a new, "I don't know what this means. Thanks!" [Laughs.]
In the wake of that success, a lot of people started holding you and some of your contemporaries up as "the saviors of country music," or as representing this sea change for the genre into more respectable artistic territory, or away from things they didn't like. Are you comfortable with all that?
I don't think that's necessarily true. I think people want to do that because it looks good in print, like they want to create some kind of battle, or like music is some kind of "it's this way or that way" thing, and it's just not important, for me. Part of playing with Justin, to me, I thought, kind of was supposed to prove that to some degree.
But I don't know, I don't think country music needs saving from anything. Whether you like modern incarnations of what country radio hits are, or you like what I'm doing, or you like something really off in folk, poetry Americana land, it's all just music, man. If you like one of them, great, go buy it.
Would you rather be blurring those lines? When people talk about country music needing saving, or shifting away from bro country or any of that which critics say has no substance, you were already part of that other world as a songwriter. Writing for some of those artists, you were connected to all that.
I'm connected to all kinds of things in that way, and I like all kinds of music. But I would rather people stop caring about lines. Nothing gets on my nerves more than somebody else spending all their energy and time talking about something that they don't like, and trying to convince you [that] you shouldn't like it, and this thing over here is better. ... I don't like sushi. In fact, I kind of loathe sushi. But I don't go around trying to convince my wife or any of my friends, "Oh, you shouldn't eat sushi, it's terrible." It's the dumbest thing ever. It doesn't make sense to me why we do that with music. We don't really do that with anything else. ... I think it's OK if somebody likes my music and likes Sam Hunt's music too. And I think if we're both selling records, it's good for everybody. I think it allows other records to get made.
Do you think about it in that sense as a songwriter as well? Was there a different process or mentality that you had writing the set of songs on Traveller than there was with songs you wrote that became Luke Bryan cuts or Kenny Chesney cuts? Are there songs that you know are songs you're writing for yourself to sing?
I'm just writing songs, and it all gets sorted it out [naturally], unless I'm writing specifically with an artist who has a notion of what they want to do, and then I try to facilitate that. But other than that, I'm just writing whatever comes up. If it's a pop song, we'll do that. If it's a jazz song, we'll do that. If it's a bluegrass song, we'll do that. But it's all one wheel to me. We're all a part of the same community, and music in general is a broader spectrum to me, like, if somebody's being successful and somebody's selling tickets to shows, it's good for the health of the whole thing. And out of that, the commerce pays for the art, and the art lends some credibility to the commerce. To think that they're all separate things is just a ludicrous idea.
What's been the most rewarding part of the success?
Probably the knowledge that we get to keep playing for a while. Those are things that you don't always know. You know, I'm 37 — 38 in April — and the closer you get to 40 and [are] not necessarily in a spot where you're making a living doing it, I mean, I made my living writing songs. I've been on the road most of the time, too. So [it's great] to be in that spot where, like, "We can make a living doing this now."
I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure I'm not, but the Grammy nominations you got — those Grammy votes were in before the CMA Awards performance and wins.
That's correct.
Is it more validating to know that wasn't in response to the attention created by the CMAs?
For sure. ... You know, when you're a kid and you think of music awards, you see a Grammy on somebody's shelf and everybody knows what that is, so validation is probably an understatement.
Is that even more so being nominated for Album of the Year? That it's not just recognition in country music, but in the broad category?
Yeah! And there are some heavy-hitters in that category [laughs], we all know that, and I don't think we're expecting to take [anything home in that category], but it's certainly nice to be mentioned alongside some of that music, and I think it's good for country music in a way that we don't always get validated that way.
Country music was ghettoized for so long — that old cliché of, "What do you listen to? Anything but country."
It used to make me so mad when I would do interviews that were outside of country — not mad, just disappointed — that that was everyone else's perception of what we are as a business and as a [genre of] music, like it wasn't even a valid thing, and that would aggravate me a little bit. With Nashville in particular, not just country music, like Nashville, but there's been a lot of changes in the last five, eight years. So Nashville's not just thought of as a country place, it's rock 'n' roll and Jack White and bluegrass and old-time.
How does it feel to hear yourself on country radio now?
Good, you know, we'd spent some time not having that, and they've really stepped it up.
Is that something that felt like it was going to be an obstacle going into the Traveller cycle?
No, not to me, I mean I'm sure it scared the record label a little bit, but they knew that that was not, at least initially, part of the plan. We really wanted to come at it from a different way and work a record instead of a single that led to a record.
Country music is such a singles-based genre
... Everything is ...
But if you think back to the album-rock era of the '70s, or even in the '80s, when you had these big blockbuster Purple Rain, Born in the U.S.A., Thriller albums, the album format was so dominant for so long, do you see yourself as trying to help bring that back as an artist, where it's not about having your album cuts and having your singles, but having a whole group of songs working together?
Well, it's much healthier for us as artists to try to market entire albums. It sounds like a little more work — it's a lot more work, I guess — to do, and it requires you to make albums. Instead of you get three singles and then be like, "All right, let's fill the rest of it up with something. These are the obvious three singles that we're going to put out." You have to care more about it than that. ...
I heard Steve Earle say one time: "A hit is an event, but if you find an audience, then you have a career." And I think that's a really true statement. And I think, as a business ... in my mind we were always in the business of trying to sell records. And when we sell records it's good, like, for me, I have one record, but I have 14 songs that I can go play that everybody knows, because everyone that comes to watch me and what we're doing, it's like I have 14 hits.
Did it feel different when you were writing songs for other people, or with other people, where it was these self-contained sessions, where the songs weren't necessarily part of a group?
No, I mean, because these songs [on Traveller] weren't part of a group until they got put into a group. And I also don't think it's healthy to think that you can write, for me, a group of songs that, 'We got two weeks, let's write a record,' and really feel like you're going to get something great out of that.
Have you started on a new record?
No. We'll probably make a new record this year coming, but we'll think about it when we need to think about it.
