Looking back at the past decade of country music, it would certainly seem Chris Stapleton has the magic touch when it comes to songwriting. “He pretty much just puts the pieces together, and bam, there’s your bridge,” country singer Jamey Johnson told American Songwriter last November. Penning hits for everyone from Dierks Bentley to Kenny Chesney, naturally, everyone is aching to hear the velvet-voiced crooner’s secret. Unfortunately, you may be disappointed.
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Speaking with 60 Minutes in 2022, the CMA’s nine-time Male Vocalist of the Year scoffed at overconfident songwriters, deriding them as “full of s—.”
“And there are a lot of songwriters who will claim that they know. ‘Yeah, I knew this—when we wrote this one that it was a six-week number one. And I was gonna get a big giant check in the mail,’” said Stapleton, 47.
In the absence of a magic 8-ball, every stroke of the pen is a shot in the dark. “Like, you can’t possibly know how everybody’s gonna feel about a song that you write. That’s impossible to know,” said the 10-time Grammy winner. “I don’t trust computer research or phone surveys or anything like that. You have to take it to the people. I trust people. And I trust people who have taste.”
For Stapleton, “The win is finishing the song,” he said.
[RELATED: 3 Hit Country Songs Chris Stapleton Wrote for Other Artists]
Most Chris Stapleton Hits Have One Thing in Common
Unfortunately for aspiring songwriters, there is no secret ingredient to Chris Stapleton’s success. Or maybe there is, but you can’t have it.
While giving a tour of his guitar collection to Cllct Media, Stapleton was asked about his prized possession. The “White Horse” singer led the interviewer straight past his extensive collection and picked up the guitar he paid $380 for when he moved to Nashville in 1996.
“It’s not precious in a collector way,” Stapleton said. “It was in a flood at some point, there’s mud inside it.”
Still, “if I had to walk out of here with one thing, it would be this,” he said. “All the other stuff, I would be sad about a lot of it, but whatever I’ve done, whatever I’ve made, or whatever I’ve turned into, has pretty much been built on this thing.”
Featured image by Kristin Callahan/Shutterstock
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