Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by the miniaturist mouse in America. Hi, it's me. Ding, ding, ding. We've been working on this one for a while. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we've been begging and working and it happened. Hustling. Yeah, down in Nashville, too, right where it should happen. That's right.
We were in the barn in Nashville, and we have Chris Stapleton today. Chris Stapleton is a Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and guitarist. His albums are Traveler, From a Room, Starting Over Higher. He's got his tour right now, the All-American Roadshow, and you can get tickets for that at www.chrisstapleton.com slash tour. He also has his own show on Sirius, which you should check out.
Check it out. And lastly, you should drink some of his traveler whiskey, which he was reticent to promote, which he should because it's a magical whiskey. It makes no... Maybe he was reticent because you're sober, but... No, he's just a guy with so much integrity, he doesn't want to self-promote. Oh, well, he definitely should have, and he should have brought us some because I wanted it.
Yeah, it's from the brewmasters. You don't call them brewmasters in whiskey. You call them some other masters. Yeah, whiskey masters. I don't know what the hell. Whiskey masters from Pappy's. Yeah, big deal. Big deal. So drink his whiskey, listen to his music, go see him on tour, and listen to him on Sirius. Please enjoy Chris Stapleton.
Is it lost? Yeah, where did I fucking put that down?
What are you looking for? My notes for you. No. You don't have them memorized? You were born April 15, 1978. That's pretty good. That's really good. It's better than I could do. Yeah, we're going to test you at the end. I don't even know when I'm born. Our birthday. Your home birthday. Did you have a nice holiday? I did. I'm from Georgia, so I was just at my family's house. It was easy.
Duluth, right? Yeah, Duluth. Oh, my God. Done your homework. No, you just said it on one. I did listen to a few things. I didn't do that much homework. I don't like to go into things doing too much homework sometimes. I like to see what happens. You got them? I think it would have been fun if you couldn't find him and we just went. I know. Well, that's basically what the interview will be.
Those are just a safety net. Where were they? On the counter inside. Oh, okay. I didn't even bring them out. I got to start by saying last summer, we got to interview a couple of people here, Jason Aldean and Luke Combs. Yeah. I got to catch my breath. Oh my. I ran. You ran. My bad calf. Oh no. He did sprints yesterday, so now he broke his body. Yeah. I told him not to do that.
My body's just broken every day. I was like, after the age 35, you shouldn't be sprinting anymore. Yeah. I don't know that that's true. I think it's really true. I think that's clinically accurate. I think that's medically true. Yeah. So we had both Jason and Luke and both of them independently went on these crazy tirades about you. To the degree of, well, nobody can sing like Chris.
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Chapter 2: How does Chris Stapleton find silence important?
We didn't butt heads in that way where I was trying to show him up. I don't know that I was trying to show my brother up as much as I just wanted his respect. I think I always felt like I had that. I don't think I had. But also I can hang. That's my point.
I think the thing you can get as a little brother is you learn how to hang because you're kind of in a situation where you're a guest and you'd be easily kicked out of the situation. And I think you kind of get good at the hang.
To your point of knowing your role or what you can contribute to a scenario, even this right now, I would have to sit here and assess what I can contribute to this conversation. You guys have done this a lot. I've done it very little. How do you like press in general? It's not my comfort zone necessarily, but I don't mind doing it.
You guys are really in luck today because I have absolutely nothing to promote or talk about. I know, that's our favorite. Yeah. That is our favorite. Our favorite is just like trying to figure out like, well, who's the guy behind all the stuff or who's the woman? When we started this show, it was not to help promote people's projects at all. It was this.
It's like, let's just have cool people who we want to get to know. And then over time, when it got bigger, then people would say like, hey, our client has a movie. Can they come on and promote the movie? And it's like at the end for five minutes, but we're here to do something else. Right. But you guys are a big enough thing that you're part of that wheel where people approach you with that.
And so you have to kind of sort that out. But we've been hunting you. We were begging for you. Yeah, yeah. Because you and Luke have the same publicist, maybe. Is that who it is? Yes. And when she was here, we were like, okay, so we really love Chris. I first saw you, you did a 60 Minutes profile probably three or four years ago. That was my first kind of glimpse.
That was it? That was it.
I mean, I'd heard your music, but that was like, oh, here's this guy who at that point on the outside, I don't know what it felt like on the inside. It was like, oh, there's a phenom on the scene.
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Chapter 3: What experiences shaped Chris Stapleton's songwriting?
And that was the essence of the 60 Minutes interview. And it was just a great profile. I also fucking love 60 Minutes. But like, how was that? Is that majorly uncomfortable? Because that's days, right? I've been real fortunate that people... I understand maybe my discomfort with some of it. And I've been real lucky in that everybody's really nice and easy to work with. You're crazy likable.
I don't know that I've had an experience where like, man, that was uncomfortable. The first time I ever went on Stern, I was uncomfortable about going on Stern.
It's scary. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was like a wild card thing. Like, I don't know what he's going to ask or how uncomfortable he's going to try to make me as he can if he wants to. It was a remarkably wonderful experience. And he was so kind. Were you shy as a kid? I don't know that I was particularly, but I find that maybe I am more as an adult. Fame can have this very bizarre effect, kind of counterintuitive effect.
It certainly had it on me, which is like, I'm a huge extrovert. All growing up, I'm such an extrovert, not shy. But when you meet people who already know you, for me, I want to deliver. I want to make sure that they enjoyed it and that when they leave, they're like, I'm glad I met him. So I enter in with a little anxiety. This change for me, it's kind of made me less of an extrovert.
Because you feel like you have to be on. Before, I was just a piece of shit. I'd meet someone at 7-Eleven. It was either funny or it wasn't. Who gave a shit? And then they drove away. But now I'm like, okay, I got it. Because it feels like some kind of pressure to perform? To deliver. Like, oh, here's someone who is telling me they love me and they love my stuff.
I want to make sure that I kind of don't let them down. That's what it is. I have the pressure of like, I don't want to let someone down who has expressed that they like me. I get that. But also, at some point, you're just a human being and you just got to go. I don't have it today, man. But thank you. I can't be the dancing thing.
My wife yelled at me for 20 minutes on the way to this airport that you're seeing me at. So, you know, keep that in mind in this interaction. There's human experiences that you bring into everything that people aren't necessarily seeing that in you in those moments. They're not assuming you might have had a really crazy, terrible morning. No. And for the most part, I don't. No.
I feel very fortunate. They're right for the most part.
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Chapter 4: How did Chris Stapleton transition to Nashville's music scene?
And that was what the first record was. That was Traveler. Yeah. He did get to see me. I mean, I was in a bluegrass band. The Steel Drivers? The Steel Drivers. And he really loved that band. He was really bummed out when I... was no longer in that band. The Steel Drivers were fucking great. That's what I've been listening to the last two days. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, that's some good first shit.
Okay, so how do you end up leaving Kentucky and then getting to Nashville? I met this guy named Steve Leslie, who was a salaried songwriter at EMI at the time through a mutual acquaintance. He went to Moorhead State University. I lived in a town called Moorhead, and I was just working on jobs and lived with a guy named Jesse Wells, who plays for Tyler Childress now.
He's an instrumentalist that I grew up with. Played Little League with. Kind of lived in a house with him. Jesse met Steve. And just in passing, I don't even know if it was a real comment, Steve told my friend, he's like, hey, if you know anybody that writes songs around here, I would love to help somebody out.
Oh, wow.
And gave him his telephone number. So I was back and forth from there. And I think I was probably back home with my parents, helping out there, doing something. I don't know what I was doing. I floated a lot in my early 20s. So I just called this guy. I said, hey, I write songs. He's like, cool. Send me a few things. I said, okay, well, here you go. And I just sent him things.
Didn't think anything of it. And a couple of weeks went by and he listened to it. Steve always likes to tell the story that he called and my mom told him, well, he's fishing. He'll have to call you back.
Yeah.
He's gone fishing. Yeah, he's literally gone fishing. But I called him back. He said, hey, man, this stuff's pretty good. Maybe you want to come down and hang out and write. And so I came down back and forth for a couple months and met a few people. And it seemed like a good thing to do. And I had zero money.
So I bombed a little bit of money off my uncle, got down to Nashville, and had about maybe a month's worth of living expenses off what I bombed off of my uncle. How soon before Seagale happened? I had a publishing deal in seven days, which is not anybody's story, but that's mine. How does it work? So you've submitted some songs to Steve.
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Chapter 5: What experiences shaped Chris Stapleton's approach to music?
Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
Now, did you get nervous for that? No, because we rehearsed two days before and we dug in and we had it dialed. It was the best possible version of whatever we could have done. And I knew that he's so pro and his band and everybody, we all dug in and we were prepared. I've heard this from a few people we had Anna Kendrick on and she was talking about having to do those troll movies.
And she went in one time and she had like a really bad cold. And Justin's just like, Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to do this, blah, blah, blah.
Chapter 6: How does Chris Stapleton handle the pressure of fame?
She was just talking about, to your point, what a fucking pro the dude is. He's been doing it since he was a child. And he took it seriously. 100%. And he intuitively knows what to do all the time. Spooky. And then this prick is the best SNL guest, host of all time.
Fuck this guy.
You're not supposed to be good on SNL on top of all this other stuff. You can dance like that and be good on SNL.
Chapter 7: What insights does Chris share about his songwriting process?
But, you know, the power of those performances is pretty staggering because also that's the Luke Combs story too. Luke Combs has this performance with Tracy Chapman. That is a big turning point, yeah, for you professionally, that performance. We spent a long time building the fire, but that threw a match on it. Yeah, yeah, right.
We had some shows booked on the West Coast and thousand seat theaters and things like that. We never played on the West Coast at that point. And they were gone like that. Very quickly escalated from that point. Yeah, it's funny how many people have this similar story where it's like it feels overnight on the outside. But you're 15 years into it or 12 years into it.
And you've had a really substantial writing career. So for you, it is incremental. But from the outside, it's like, oh, wow, this is like a light switch. That is definitely the view to the passerby on the television. Do you think because you had had little tastes of success along the way that by the time this thing came around, you had a little practice?
Were you able to take in that moment in the ways that you would like to have? No. And we won a bunch of awards and things. We weren't supposed to win any of those things.
Chapter 8: What reflections does Chris have on his career and future?
Album sold $2 million. Like, everything's fucking on fire at that moment. Yeah. It was very quickly just a different ballgame. In the moment, there was a lot of celebratory thing backstage. It was a very surreal moment for me and everybody at work with us. And it's an unforgettable... I think everybody who... makes a jump somewhere in their career can pinpoint moments.
And that's definitely one for us. Some people handle it well and some people don't handle it well. I don't think I would have handled it well. Had you not been like married and stable and had some practice? Yeah, I was 38 or something. Yeah, yeah. I know you imagine giving yourself that whole experience at 21 years old or any of the ones I had. No, I'd be dead.
Yeah, I'd have burnt the whole place down, you know, a weekend. Some people aren't meant to handle that. And the universe was looking out for me in that way. But also I'm appreciated in different ways than somebody might that was 19. You already made a good living. It's not like you're going to experience money for the first time.
You're going to experience a lot more money, but you got to practice with some of this stuff. A little bit. What I didn't get to practice for was people driving up to your house or tour bus coming by. That was very hard for me. I was going to say, you don't strike me as someone that would love the fame aspect of all this. No, I don't enjoy that. I don't enjoy it for my children.
Do you feel like you should have done the Kiss version? Kiss version? Full paint? Listen, those guys had something figured out. Those guys were marketing geniuses. Well, what you do have going for you is you have this easy top thing, which is you could probably shave your beard at some point and go back to anonymous. That's my retirement plan. Yeah, I think that's a solid one.
Do you think you're trying to be invisible with your beard and your hair and your hat? I mean, I've had the beard and hair a long time, and I'm sure there is some shield aspect. Some hiding. I had a grill blow up on me, and it was protective in that way. So it protected me from fire. Wait, you had a barbecue that exploded? Oh, my God. Did it catch the hair on fire? Oh, yeah.
It took hair off here and hair all the way off this arm. I had a gap in my beard for a minute. Were you lighting it and the gas had built up in it? I was sleepy, and it was a rental house.
Sleepy.
I thought I had lit it and I turned them all on. Yeah. I was like, oh shit, I didn't light it. It just filled that fucker. Oh shit. Yeah. Oh boy. Loud explosion? Yeah, it was dumb. And then you got to come in and say to your wife, look what I just did. Yeah. Yeah. Now you got to worry about me grilling. Well, you feel the skin peeling off your face and all that kind of stuff.
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