Chris Stapleton is clearing the air on his reported sobriety, telling Rolling Stone in a new interview that while he no longer drinks as much as he once did, he wouldn’t consider himself sober.
Is Chris Stapleton Sober?
“I think the word ‘sober’ got used in an interview, and it’s probably a disservice to sober people to call me sober — certainly as we’re sitting here talking about drinking,” he said. “I don’t drink as much as I used to. I’m a 45-year-old man who has a lot more responsibilities and a lot less time for leisure than I used to have. But I do enjoy it. The first room you walk in at my house, there’s probably 200 bottles of bourbon there.”
Stapleton was referring to an interview with GQ published in October 2023, where the Kentucky native had said he was almost entirely sober and had felt during his early years in Nashville that drinking might be a way to improve the music he made.
“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 said at the time. “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 joked that he likes “to tell people that I got into a drinking contest with myself in my 20s, and I lost.”
GQ added that the singer has been “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 New Traveller Whiskey
The Grammy winner clarified to Rolling Stone that he does still drink and most likely enjoys a glass of his new Traveller Whiskey, which he recently launched in a partnership with Buffalo Trace Distillery and Master Distiller Harlen Wheatley, from time to time.
Traveller Whiskey was named after Stapleton’s smash 2015 album Traveller and makes him the latest artist to get into the alcohol business, though the singer wanted to wait and make sure he found the right reason to do so.
“I’ve had people push me to do the ‘slap your name on the bottle’ kind of thing, and I’ve had no real interest,” Stapleton explained. “I wanted it to feel authentic, and beyond that, I just wanted it to be good.”
He Was Involved With Every Step Of The Creation Process Of The Whiskey
Stapleton was involved in every step of the Traveller Whiskey creation process, including a note on the back of each bottle that reads, “Good whiskey is like a good song. It requires no explanation. One taste should tell you everything you need to know.”
“I wrote drafts of it and did all the editing,” he recalled. “I spent as much time working on those parts of this project as I have anything in recent memory, including records and touring.”
As for his favorite way to drink his own brand, Stapleton isn’t too fussy. “It takes too long,” he said of making a cocktail. “Just pour it in the glass and let’s go.”
Traveller Whiskey was widely released to retailers, bars and restaurants across the country on January 1 and has a suggested retail price of $39.99.
