The most famous Jeep in Nashville is headed north. It’s a ’79 Cherokee and an immaculate restoration from gas cap to roof rack: shiny as a hard-shell coffee candy on the outside, all creamy-caramel contours within, the kind of thing that would catch the eye of a certain kind of car geek—of which there seems to be no shortage on I-65 heading toward the Kentucky state line—no matter who the driver. So, for those who pull up alongside to take a look, it might be purely a bonus to find Chris Stapleton, one of the most famous men in country music, behind the wheel. The crank-operated windows are open, and so is the road. Wind whips around the tufts of long hair that peek out of Stapleton’s baseball cap as he leans back in the driver’s seat.
“This is what I call an active driver,” he says affectionately of the Jeep, which remains charmingly claptrap despite a state-of-the-art 392 Hemi under the hood. “Modern cars have kind of made us numb to the sensation of how fast we’re going. Or, you know, how dangerous the entire act of flying down the road at 60 miles per hour really is.” Those dangers are soon to be made even more apparent: We’re headed to the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Stapleton’s plan being to spend a rare off-day on the racetrack there with a Z06 supercar.
Sneaking in moments like this can be tough. “We’ve been hitting it pretty heavy since 2015,” Stapleton says. His All-American Road Show Tour, a showcase for his genre-straddling brand of stadium-rocking country, has been crisscrossing the nation since 2017. Until recently, that meant squeezing a bunch of postponed pandemic shows into the already busy schedule. “It was kind of a logistical nightmare. A lot of hard, long runs for bus drivers and production people,” Stapleton says. The Road Show is an unwieldy beast, traveling with eight tour buses, ten 18-wheelers, and a staff of 65, not including local support and a diverse roster of opening acts. “We’re not Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, but it’s a sizable operation.”
Myriad other priorities compete for mind space these days. Stapleton is preparing to release a new album, Higher, in November. He’s also raising five kids with his wife and creative partner, Morgane, three of them boys under six. “Boys are kind of cavemen until they’re 17,” he says, sighing. “You’re just trying to make sure everybody doesn’t get killed.”
So, today is a day to get out of town, yield to a wild hair, indulge one’s prerogative as a rich and famous man to drive an absurdly high-performance car around a racetrack at video game speeds.
For now, we truck along unhurriedly in the middle lane. The Jeep Cherokee is a key part of Stapleton’s origin story, the vehicle that literally started him down the road to superstardom. Ten years ago, shortly after the death of Stapleton’s father, Morgane found the Jeep in Phoenix and bought it for $10,000; they’d fly out there and then road-trip home to Tennessee, something to shake off the fog of grief. Stapleton was 37 then. He was a well-established writer of songs for other people and had met with some success as the lead singer of the bluegrass band the SteelDrivers, but had found little traction with his own recording career. If nothing changed by 40, he thought privately, he would hang up his solo aspirations and stick to writing.
On the drive from Phoenix, he wrote a song called “Traveller,” which became the title track of his 2015 debut album, a work for which nobody had much commercial hope until the moment it won album of the year at the Country Music Association Awards. That same night, Stapleton also bagged awards for new artist and male vocalist of the year. Traveller became Billboard’s number one country album for 2016 and 2017, when it was joined in the number two spot by Stapleton’s follow-up, From a Room: Volume 1. It was eventually certified six-times platinum and notched achievements many fans may be unaware exist: Its breakout single, “Tennessee Whiskey,” scored two successive Tunie awards for most-played song on Waffle House jukeboxes nationwide. On the back of the Cherokee is affixed a Waffle House license-plate holder, commemorating the milestone.
It’s an old story by now, but Nashville loves a legend. And whatever string Stapleton plucked in the American consciousness continues to vibrate. The three albums that followed Traveller all went platinum; Stapleton won Grammys and then more Grammys; he sang the national anthem at this year’s Super Bowl. He has become the rarest of rare 21st-century phenomenons: a monocultural star, at once deeply embedded in country music—niftily slipping through the raindrops of the genre’s many factions, divisions, and culture wars (albeit by not saying much about them)—and a collaborator with everybody from Adele and Pink to Justin Timberlake to Joy Oladokun. Country radio listeners, Americana heads, bros, traditionalists, neo-traditionalists, poptimists, critics, crowds—all claim some part of Stapleton as their own.
This May, a photo went viral of Stapleton after the Academy of Country Music Awards, seemingly helping to clean up fallen confetti with a leaf blower. Stapleton quickly did his best to debunk the idea that he was pitching in on cleanup duty, but viruses seek a hospitable host: Somehow his honesty about not sticking around to clean the stadium floor only served to confirm that he was exactly the kind of guy who would stick around to clean the stadium floor. You just can’t stop a man on a hot streak.
A motorcyclist pulls up alongside the Cherokee and flashes a thumbs-up before zooming off down the road, just one more reminder that in this world riven by division and hate, one thing is clear: Everybody Loves Chris.
The command center of Stapleton Nation lies camouflaged in a sign-less warehouse about 10 minutes off Music Row. Behind its drab façade is a hallucination of a man cave. Stapleton and his team moved in during the pandemic, creating a combination office, rehearsal-performance space, and dream clubhouse. Japanese globe lights hang overhead; there are reconfigurable sitting areas stacked with books and guitars. There’s a pool table, vintage jukeboxes, a rack of expensive bourbon, a side table with three Grammys on it. The Jeep Cherokee is parked here today, along with the truck it begat—Ram’s custom Traveller edition, which looks like it could eat the older vehicle for breakfast. Stapleton also owns a Tesla Model S and a Corvette Z06.
Against one wall are towering stacks of music gear old and new and other assorted memorabilia. Some items, like a large carved wooden eagle, are gifts from grateful concert venues; Stapleton returns from tour as laden with tributes as a president from a state visit. More are products of a deep collector’s compulsion. Scouring local music shops, antiques stores, and online marketplaces is one of his primary methods of killing time on the road. “It’s my version of hunting,” he says. “Sometimes you strike out and you’re just like, Well, this isn’t what I thought I was walking into. But that’s fine too.”
He likes stuff that has “ghosts.” Like a 1920s Steinway upright piano he found somewhere in Pennsylvania and made room for on one of the tour trucks (“The crew hates me for a day, and then we’re cool”); or a vintage Ludwig drumstick display now being used as a makeshift wine rack; or a travel case with “Willie Nelson” stenciled on its side. “I feel like you can pull those ghosts into what you’re doing. It’s like meeting the older guys and soaking up as much as you can,” Stapleton says.
Eight years on from his breakthrough, he seems to still get a dazed kick out of proximity to such legends. He takes self-deprecating glee in recounting a story of playing a show outside Memphis and being invited to visit Jerry Lee Lewis, who lived nearby. “We were all stoked. So, we go over there, sit down in the living room, and there’s no Jerry Lee.” Lewis’s wife informed them that the Great Man did not feel well and had retreated to his bedroom. “We hang out for a minute and his wife gives us cookies and grape Propel water, and he never comes out. He was a no-show in his own house!” As they were leaving, Lewis’s wife gave Stapleton a copy of Lewis’s memoir. “He obviously pre-signed it in one color. And then he wrote a note in another color: ‘To Chris, God Bless. Jerry Lee.’ Except it was a picture of him and he circled the word God and drew an arrow to himself!” Stapleton lets out a cackle.
It is easy to spend a lot of time watching Stapleton on video or looking at him in photos and only later realize that you don’t have a very clear picture of his face: When not hidden in the shadows of a cowboy hat, it is often covered by sunglasses. The curtains of hair and beard may be classic Outlaw trappings, but they can also leave you with the impression of a cartoon dog doing his best to hide inside a haystack. In person, his face is brighter and more boyish than brooding, the eyes quicker to light up in amusement. He seems like a naturally friendly guy who has had to learn to be more guarded. And there’s some hard stuff in there, too. He bristles when pushed to talk about anything he doesn’t want to, politics especially. And he knows how to hold a grudge: He’s still irritated by the time, long before fame hit, when he was passed over two weeks in a row at the Bluebird Cafe’s famous open mic night. But he is at ease in this space, and eager to geek out over, say, the difficulty of finding Russian-made parts for old tube amps, so much so that Morgane has to gently but firmly interrupt to summon him to lunch with her and three or four members of their professional team.
We gather around a long table and split up plates from a Mexican restaurant (named Pancho & Lefty’s Cantina, naturally). The group is buzzing from a trip to see Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour in Atlanta the night before.
“It’s a big show. You know, there’s dancers and explosions, all those things, but at the core of it it’s just her singing her ass off,” Stapleton says, assiduously picking onions off of a taco salad.
“At some point, we hit a wall and it was just like, How is she still going?” Morgane says.
“She was conserving energy,” Stapleton says, in a tone of professional admiration. “You could see when she would recharge—be singing and not doing all the energy stuff, and then go back to doing the high-energy stuff.”
“Let me ask you, as a singer,” Morgane says, “is singing not energy?”
Sensing perhaps that even the appearance of diminishing Beyoncé’s performance will yield nothing good, Stapleton lets it drop. He muses on the video content the show used during Beyoncé’s costume changes. “Maybe we can do that for my show. Just get me nearly naked on a bearskin rug.”
I ask whether he actually makes any costume changes onstage.
“No, not at all,” he says.
“A dry shirt might be nice,” says Morgane, who spends every show standing about five feet from her husband, tambourine in hand.
“Let me tell you, during a hot show I would love a dry shirt,” Stapleton agrees.
The Stapletons met while working at neighboring music-publishing companies on Music Row. She has become, in every way, his creative partner. When he speaks about his career, it is most often in the first-person plural. Of the 14 songs on Higher, she sings background on 10, often following her husband’s vocal so closely that the effect could be double-tracking. She is also a producer on the album and, as has been true throughout his career, had a large hand in choosing which songs from Stapleton’s huge catalog made the cut. “She’s my barometer on songs,” Stapleton says. “Even if your wife wasn’t heavily involved in your career, if you’re happily married and you want to stay that way, you don’t want to sing things that your wife hates.”
The road trip he and I take to Bowling Green lasts about three and a half hours. Later, neither he nor Morgane will be able to remember the last time they were more than a few feet apart for that long.
Most of the people around the table go back to what they still refer to as “the Before Times.” That means before November 4, 2015, the night Traveller scored its upset wins at the CMAs and, perhaps more important, Stapleton performed an epic duet with Justin Timberlake.
It was Morgane’s idea to ask Timberlake to perform; it hadn’t been that long since Stapleton had been the entertainment at Timberlake’s birthday party. Her hunch paid off beyond all imagination. Timberlake not only said yes but demanded a lengthy, eight-minute slot that crossed over the top of an hour, to maximize viewers. The two performed Stapleton’s soul-soaked version of “Tennessee Whiskey” and Timberlake’s “Drink You Away,” a match that suddenly seemed preordained. By the next morning, Stapleton was somehow simultaneously the savior of country and its biggest crossover star. Also, every show on his upcoming tour was sold out. The CMA performance remains electric to watch, a bolt of lighting amid the fog of “bro-country”—young, good-looking dudes singing about a handful of clichéd country tropes (beer, trucks, girls) in a style that owed more to rap, rock, and mainstream pop than to Hank Williams—that dominated at the time. As Timberlake and Stapleton trade verses, the show’s director increasingly cuts to the crowd, which seems to be emerging in stages from a deep slumber. This culminates in a shot of Dobro-ist Jerry Douglas wearing a look that approximates someone gazing upon the burning bush.
But the clip is also instructive about two very different types of charisma. Timberlake is all whoops and spins and seductive slips and slides; Stapleton’s energy is more rooted, almost inward facing, as if content to wait for the crowd to come to him. If J.T. is a leaping flame, Stapleton is a glowing coal.
I’m reminded of this as the conversation at lunch drifts around the table. Rare is the celebrity who seems to need it quite as little as Stapleton does.
“I’d be lying if I said that I don’t like going out and playing a show to a full house of people. Especially when you’ve played for no people. That’s the drug,” he says. “But to be famous for the sake of being famous…. That was never the main want.”
Indeed, it is crucial to Stapleton’s story, to the creative decisions he’s been able to make, to the kind of celebrity he has become, and to the seemingly universal goodwill he’s managed to maintain that the “main want,” what he came to Nashville for, was not to be a star but to be a writer.
The Jeep Cherokee slides across the state line, into Kentucky, Stapleton’s homeland. There’s nothing that says you need to be from anywhere in particular to make country music. All other things being equal, though, the hundred mile radius around Staffordsville, where Stapleton grew up, is a pretty good choice. That’s where Route 23 winds through eastern Kentucky, passing through, or by, towns like Olive Hill (Tom T. Hall), Ashland (Naomi and Wynonna Judd), Cordell (Ricky Skaggs), Van Lear (Loretta Lynn), Flatwoods (Billy Ray Cyrus), Paintsville (Tyler Childers), and Pikeville (Dwight Yoakam and Patty Loveless), to name just a few—a disproportion of talent perhaps only matched by the Mississippi Delta or the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans.
That is not to say that Stapleton’s childhood was drenched in mandolin and sepia. He barely encountered bluegrass until his 20s (though he would go on to be nominated with the SteelDrivers for the Grammy for best bluegrass album). He has worried that his childhood was insufficiently dramatic to be a great artist. His favorite album was, and remains, Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. His first concert was Bon Jovi. His father, a mining engineer, played Outlaw country and old R&B.
“If you distill down those influences, I don’t think that my music doesn’t make sense,” he says. Indeed, they read like a chemical formula.
In high school, Stapleton played football, baseball, basketball, and whatever else the athletic department threw at him. He was also class valedictorian. Unsure what was next, he headed to college at Vanderbilt, in Nashville, thinking to follow in his father’s engineering footsteps. But once he’d arrived in the country music mecca, he caught wind of a different path.
“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 says. “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.”
Having dropped out of school and moved back to eastern Kentucky, he began nibbling at the edges of this new world. “It was just a snowball effect of meeting good people,” he says. “Some people have opposite stories, where they meet really not good people. The good thing for me is that I didn’t have enough money to scam. So they either wanted to work with me based on what they heard, or they didn’t.” He came to Nashville in a Nissan Maxima holding a duffel bag of clothes, a guitar, a digital recorder, and a kitchen chair taken from his parents’ house, which he still carries around to sit on when recording. He was 23.
The country music business has long run on a system of songwriting in which writers get together for formalized writing sessions. “I don’t want to use the word factory, but it’s very much a workman’s approach,” Stapleton says. “You show up every day at a set time with the goal that in three to five hours you’ll have a finished song.” It’s not a system that allows for periods of writer’s block. “You learn how to turn it on, even if it’s not the best version of you. To say, Now it’s time to work. And the great thing about co-writing is that the day you don’t feel like doing anything, your co-writer is probably going to be on fire. You stick your lightning rod up in the air and you’re like, All right. I know where we’re at now.”
Stapleton was offered a contract with a publishing company four days after arriving back in Nashville, an all but unheard of timeline. He quickly gained a reputation as both a versatile talent and a workhorse, regularly scheduling three writing sessions per day, where most writers topped out at one.
“I loved it. I still love it. 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.”
Stapleton has become a scholar of the method: “Some rooms you go into where you have to operate primarily as a lyricist, because the other people have the other stuff covered. 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.”
Still, he has learned not to take inspiration for granted. He used to believe that, if a song was good, he’d remember it; if he didn’t, it probably wasn’t worth it in the first place. Then one day, “I had something that was really cool and I forgot it,” he says, despair lingering in his voice. “I was like, I can’t get it back. I couldn’t get it back. It was gone.” Now, his phone is filled with notes and brief audio snippets; he’ll pull over to record or jot an idea down. For the past few years, his tour’s backstage setup has included a shadow set of instruments used to warm up and rehearse, but also to record on, should inspiration strike. The song “Cold,” from Starting Over, was born in that way.
“That one won a Grammy,” Stapleton notes dryly. “So, you know, it was worth having the setup.”
By 2015, Stapleton had written or co--written hits for George Strait, Alan Jackson, Sheryl Crow, Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney, and dozens of others.
But all the time, like a swordsman fighting left-handed, Stapleton had that voice in his back pocket.
Actually, it was something of an open secret. By the time he got around to Traveller, most of Nashville had heard Stapleton’s voice in one place or another—as the singer for the SteelDrivers, which grew out of an informal bluegrass jam session his frequent writing partner Mike Henderson organized; in songwriting meetings; or as a much sought after recorder of demos for other people’s songs.
“He would come in to sing a song and he would know the song. He would nail it on the first take, then he’d go back and put the harmonies on it, and it’d be done in 15 minutes,” Henderson told me. (Henderson, who was 70, died in his sleep on September 22.)
Just as it had once surprised Stapleton to learn that a singer might not write their own songs, it never occurred to him that a songwriter wouldn’t also sing. Such is the privilege of those born with a voice like his: alternately thick with sand or clear as a chime, capable of all the athleticism required in the era of TV-talent-show-pipes-worship (“Did Chris Stapleton win The Voice?” is a very popular Google search), but also uncommon delicacy. The late music writer Peter Cooper told a story about the guitar being passed around at a party filled with famous musicians, and Lee Ann Womack elbowing him in the ribs and whispering, “Listen to this,” when Stapleton took his turn. The bluegrass innovator Ricky Skaggs remembers sitting on his tour bus at a festival and sliding the screen door open to better hear the voice drifting over from a distant stage. It was like nothing he’d heard in bluegrass, he says: “It was like he could do anything and everything.”
“He was everybody’s behind-the-scenes favorite,” says SteelDrivers fiddle player Tammy Rogers.
For all that, an album he produced for Universal Nashville was met with a lukewarm reception at the label, which saw few prospects for it on the notoriously narrow and data-driven world of country radio. It was said that he tested poorly among young female listeners, despite having written a monster bro-country hit in Luke Bryan’s “Drink a Beer.” Even he saw the obstacles.
“I mean, you show a picture of a young cat and then a 37-year-old guy who looks like he came off the Beverly Hillbillies…. I see how that makes sense,” he says. The one radio single he did release failed to make an impression.
Finally, he approached new leadership at Universal and asked for a last chance. “I said, The radio thing isn’t working out for me. Would you mind if I just made a record and went out and played live? Because that’s what I know how to do. Just let me do that, and I think it will be okay.” To produce, he tapped Dave Cobb, whose work with Sturgill Simpson he admired. They recorded Traveller in a week. His goal was to sell 20,000 copies, enough to be able to make another record. By summer, a combination of Stapleton’s live performances and a well of industry goodwill had begun to build word of mouth about the album. The era of streaming domination was still around the corner, but Traveller was proving an early example of how an artist could thrive outside the hegemony of country radio. In early September, the CMA nominations were announced.
As Morgane Stapleton puts it, “Things were definitely ramping up. But nobody could see November coming.”
When we arrive at the track, there’s a multicolored row of Corvettes waiting at the NCM Motorsports Park, glittering like gumballs on the sun-blasted concrete. It looks like you might get a four-pack of them as a parting gift, though at a starting price of $140,000 that is not likely. Stapleton’s own Z06 has too few miles on it to really open up yet, so we’re borrowing a bright red number for a few spins around the track. “Watch the brakes until they warm up,” the man in charge advises, genially. “They’ll take your molars out.” The engine occupies the space that, in a normal car, would be the back seat. It growls up against our backs.
“I’m not a daredevil,” Stapleton reassures me, as we ease out behind a lead car. Soon we’re whipping around a 3.15-mile course, hitting a cool 135 on the straightaways.
“There’s something almost primal about that sound,” Stapleton says. “You know, a good electric guitar is kind of the same thing. You make these sounds…. It can get very violent, very aggressive.”
You can hear that aggression on “White Horse,” the first single from the new album, Higher, and a good reminder of that Bon Jovi concert a young Chris Stapleton attended. There’s not much else like “White Horse” on the album. But then, the record is Stapleton’s most eclectic and boundary-pushing yet. The opening track, “What Am I Gonna Do,” written with Miranda Lambert, is a sly entry into country music’s ever-expanding taxonomy of human heartbreak—in this case, nailing a vivid interlude somewhere past acceptance but pre-peace. Further on, there’s a solid trucker anthem, and at least two songs that you can instantly imagine a generation of wedding-montage videos being set to—including the Wildflowers-inflected “Trust.”
But the pulsing heart of Higher is a bedroom suite of four songs that lean straight into pure R&B. That Stapleton is a soul singer in a cowboy hat has been his not-so-secret code ever since “Tennessee Whiskey.” Here, he goes full smolder, invoking Robert Cray, Al Green, Sam Cooke, and more. He is almost bashful about the Quiet Storm of it all. “You do these things with your wife’s permission,” he says.
It raises the question of whether he’s ever considered making a straight soul record. “I don’t know that I would consider making a straight anything,” he says. “If it was all just bedroom songs or all rockin’ songs with horse metaphors or whatever, it wouldn’t feel interesting to me. It wouldn’t feel representative of everything I enjoy or think that people want to hear.”
The cynical-minded might suggest that the eclecticism of Higher is a canny move to hit as many fan-pleasing notes as possible. Others will see it as the genuine product of a searching, creative mind. Or you might reflect that the great blessing bestowed on certain artists at certain times is the state of having both things being true at once.
During the pandemic, the Stapletons began going to therapy together. “It was a way to kind of help us navigate what the world was, what that meant to our family, to our business,” he says. He’s been outspoken about erasing the stigma of seeking such help and it’s hard not to spot the mark of introspection across Higher.
“The Bottom” is a monologue of alcoholic self-delusion. If you were to generate a word cloud of Stapleton lyrics, whiskey would loom large. His preshow ritual once involved a shot of tequila. Now, he performs exercises prescribed by a voice coach and 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.’ ”
“I like to tell people that I got into a drinking contest with myself in my 20s, and I lost,” he says. Certainly, he was not the first aspiring country musician to believe that self--destruction was a prerequisite for credibility. “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 says. “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.’ ”
We’re pointed back south now, toward Tennessee. The Cherokee clops along like a comfy old horse after the jet engine of the Corvette. The white line ticks by under the front left tire.
Higher ends on just this image. In the song “Mountains of My Mind,” Stapleton, alone with an acoustic guitar, sings about escaping somewhere, “where no one knows me, where no one even cares.”
Morgane Stapleton spent the recording of “Mountains of My Mind” curled up under the control room soundboard, sobbing. “I still haven’t heard it without crying,” she says.
“I’m like, ‘Well, that’s how I know it’s good,’ ” says Stapleton. “The thing you need to know about my wife is that she likes super-sad songs.”
The sentiment of “Mountains of My Mind” is real, at least part of the time: “Everybody has some version of that. Just ‘I want to get the fuck out of here. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to be whoever I’m supposed to be today.’ Whether it’s a mother raising kids or somebody getting older and lonely,” he says. “And anybody who’s been in the position we’re in has some kind of impostor syndrome. You start to not feel like a real person, you know what I’m saying? You start to understand when you see guys talk about themselves in the third person. The reason they do that, I believe, is that they’re not really talking about themselves. They’re talking about whatever the thing is of themselves that people want to purchase or go see.”
There is no more dangerous word in country music than authenticity—a labyrinth, a false flag, a cudgel, and a trap, not to mention a marketing plan. So I mean something different when I nevertheless propose that something authentic helps account for the seemingly universal response Stapleton provokes in people. Not the cowboy hats or the hair. Not even the voice or the songs, though maybe they should be enough. Maybe in this world of grifts, scams, put-ons, focus groups, and constructed identities, we are like insects who have evolved new sensory organs—nascent antennae designed to cut through the murk and recognize the thin, fragile signal of something, anything, that feels real.
There’s something heartening in the fact that such an instinct even survives in these times: that if America is going to agree to go gaga for anybody, it’s still sometimes the guy who’s worked hard, acted decently, followed his own counsel, and hasn’t yet started referring to himself in the third person. And, if it comes to it, there are ways that a man in his position can make himself disappear. Pull a Garth Brooks and vanish into a concocted Chris Gaines, for instance. Or shave. Though it doesn’t seem we’re in imminent danger of losing our great unifier. “If I shave, it means I’m retiring,” he snorts. “And I don’t think I’m bored enough with myself just yet.”
Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2023 issue of GQ with the title “The United States of Chris Stapleton”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Stacy Kranitz
Location: RCA Studio A