Chris Stapleton revealed in a new interview with GQ that he is almost entirely sober, explaining that he felt during his early years in Nashville that drinking might be a way to improve the music he made.
Sobriety Journey
“When you’re younger, you feel like you have to do certain things in order to occupy some of these spaces, to make yourself feel like you’re legit. You want to feel things. You want to be able to write about things authentically,” he reflected. “If somebody working a different kind of job drank themselves to death in the name of being better at that job, it wouldn’t make sense to anybody. We wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, he must have been the greatest electrician who ever lived.’ ”
Stapleton added that he likes “to tell people that I got into a drinking contest with myself in my 20s, and I lost.”
Now, at 45 years old, the “It Takes A Woman” singer has been, as GQ put it, “all but sober” for several years. “I didn’t have to go to rehab, but from a 45-year-old-man health perspective, a doctor’s gonna look at me and go, ‘Hey, man, probably cut out the drinking,’ and I’d be like, ‘Okay, cool,’” Stapleton said.
Stapleton’s forthcoming new album, Higher, includes a new song titled “The Bottom,” which dives into the contemplation that often accompanies excessive drinking.
Dropped Out Of College To Pursue Songwriting
After dropping out of college at Vanderbilt and moving back home to Kentucky, Stapleton returned to Nashville at age 23 and booked a publishing contract within days.
“The notion of writing songs was not foreign to me. What was foreign to me was learning that when George Strait sang a song, he didn’t necessarily write it,” he said of his early goal of becoming a songwriter. “When I found out that there was this golden job where someone would pay you to sit in a room and make up songs…I thought, Man, that’s the greatest job in the world.”
While many writers would schedule one writing session per day, Stapleton would often book three.
“I loved it [and] I still love it,” he said. “I wouldn’t have the stamina for three a day now. But it was a dream gig. And you’re a contractor, essentially; it’s a performance-based job. The law of averages told me that if I wrote more songs, I’d have more opportunities for success. And in the meantime I was educating myself on how to do it.”
Learning His Role In The Songwriting Room
Stapleton also told the publication that one of those lessons was learning which role to play during any given writing session.
“Some rooms you go into where you have to operate primarily as a lyricist, because the other people have the other stuff covered,” he explained. “Or sometimes you’re the music guy, the other people are doing the lyrics. A lot of times there’s a track already built. You have to be able to identify who you are in the room at that time.”
After scoring hits for artists like George Strait, Alan Jackson, Sheryl Crow, Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney and more, Stapleton began releasing music of his own, eventually shooting to stardom during the 2015 CMA Awards, when his Traveller was crowned Album of the Year and he performed with Justin Timberlake during the broadcast.
Now, Stapleton is one of the biggest names in country music, currently traveling on his All-American Road Show Tour. “We’re not Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but it’s a sizable operation,” he said of his tour, which boasts eight tour buses, ten 18-wheelers and a staff of 65.
During a break from his own shows, Stapleton did make it to see Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour in Atlanta and expressed admiration for his fellow performer’s skill set. “It’s a big show,” he said. “You know, there’s dancers and explosions, all those things, but at the core of it, it’s just her singing her ass off.”
