Chris Stapleton, a fan of Joe Rogan’s, shares his career philosophy—prioritizing music over fame, with Traveler released December 1st. He wrote over 1,000 songs, including "Might As Well Get Stoned" at 25, and tours selectively (weekend runs) to balance family, like his wife’s homeschooling plans for twins. Stapleton critiques industry pressures—dismissing awards as political—and favors spontaneity in songwriting over endless revision, trusting first instincts. His unconventional path, from bluegrass gigs to Justin Timberlake and Adele collaborations, proves authenticity and adaptability matter more than rigid expectations. Nashville’s commercialization risks diluting its artistic soul, he warns. [Automatically generated summary]
To the degree that it's happening right now, you know, probably since, you know, 2015. A couple years of Good Strong, we're going on three of, you know, playing shows to more people than we knew ever came to live shows.
So, yeah, it's been, you know, a strange, life-altering thing.
But I love talking to people that are like a year, two years into the situation you're in right now, where you're just kind of getting settled into it, where it still seems like Fantasyland.
There again, if you just simplify it down to let the music lead and let that kind of be always the focus, for me, that makes it real easy to not make decisions you would regret or feel like weren't you.
So as long as that's the focus, that's okay.
All that other stuff just kind of becomes external noise that we'll all...
It doesn't matter.
It's not a hard thing to navigate in that realm to me.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think if you roll up into the music business, or, you know, this is my experience.
If you roll up into...
Wanting to make records and wanting to be in the music business and wanting to live and play music, having absolutely no opinion of what you want to do or who you are or how you do it, and you want everybody else to tell you how to do it and what to do and when and where and why, then yeah, it can be a confusing thing because there will be a lot of external opinions that aren't yours that will create someone that is not you that you will have to play for the rest of your life.
So, Was that a lot of information in that moment?
So, you know, but as long as you're doing things that that are you and and do come, you know, from you and and from who you are and what you like to do, that's never a wrong decision.
And sometimes that doesn't add up to most times it doesn't add up to some kind of commercial success.
But, you know, at least you can look at yourself in the mirror on it and not hate whatever it is you have to go out and play.
Yeah, well, or you ignore some other passion or talent that you have under the guise of it seeming risky or irresponsible and try to go do this thing that seems like, in your mind, is the normal thing to do.
Yeah, he wrote a bunch of books under a pseudonym because he was so gigantic that he decided to write some books under a different name so that people would sort of appreciate the work for what it was instead of as a Stephen King book, I think, or just maybe even as an exercise.
Yeah, and sometimes it's just a song that gets them, and if you sell that song individually, that'll get them, and then maybe they'll check, all right, I'm listening to this a hundred times.
Well, I moved to Nashville when I was 23. And probably the first three years I was in town, I only wrote three times a day, living, eating, sleeping, breathing, songwriting.
You know, those terms are worked out, whether you have what percentage of publishing they have and what percentage you have, and they pay you a salary in exchange for, you know.
Well, no, I made a very comfortable living up to the point.
And that allowed me to go out and play bluegrass for next to no money or play rock and roll and have fun doing it and not worry about that being how I'm making a living.
I still write with people when they ask me to do that because it's cool to get in somebody else's head or kind of sit down with them and try to help them realize some vision of what it is they want to do.
That's still one of my favorite things to do.
Just as interested in that as I am in doing my own thing a lot.
For me, generally, if I was just going to say, hey, I'm going to sit down and go over in that corner and write a song, I'd have a guitar.
I'd probably have a legal pad and a pen, much like we have sitting right here.
And I'd start strumming until that felt like something.
And how does that make me feel?
I don't know.
I'd start humming a melody, maybe.
And hopefully somewhere in humming the melody, a word would pop out that...
Or a noise I would make would turn into a word.
word and from there you can kind of grow this thing into whatever it is supposed to be.
Now that's how I would do it if I was sitting around by myself.
Now there's other times you and I could be having a conversation and you could say a phrase or a line or I could read a sign going down the road.
If you're a songwriter, you're always writing songs.
It's not like a choice that you have.
It's like an affliction that you have.
In some way, so you're just kind of walking around unconsciously, things will hit you, you know, or moments will hit you, or a visual will hit you, and that will spark something.
So that's really, it can come from anywhere, and that's the truth.
On the Traveler record that we had a couple records back, Traveler, I wrote driving down the road, you know, driving down through the desert on Interstate 40, you know, wrote the whole thing driving, and then I had to go figure out how to play it.
I mean, they're all cataloged, you know, at the publishing company I write for, you know, and they're all, you know, accounted for for the most part, and I can kind of go back through them and dig in them if I need to.
Yeah, all the, you know, this record we're putting out and the last record that we have out, save for a few covers, they're all songs that are, you know, a decade old or something.
Yeah, here, music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of fuel.
Sentimental people call it inspiration, but what they really mean is fuel.
I've always needed fuel.
I'm a serious consumer.
On some nights, I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about 50 more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.
Yeah, it's uniquely inspirational, like very few things.
And the art of music and music creation is such a...
I think when it's done correctly I should say is it's a very pure art form in the sense that the people that are doing it are really like digging into their creative engines and You know just getting the gears turning and pulling these things out and It represents, like, however much burden you have in your personality, in your life, that can either help you or hurt you in this process.
And some people's music sort of represents the torment of their life.
And some people's music represents the purity of their vision.
But it all has different effects on people in some sort of strange and bizarre way.
Yeah, I like to say that, you know, the songs, I was talking about, I forget what I was talking about this, but I like songs that allow you to take ownership of them and make them personal to you.
Man, it's just the, just to be an artist in any form, right, requires all this vulnerability and just trying to Trying to find whatever it is when you're trying to create something.
Where is that coming from?
The ether, the muse.
It's trying to just find that thing.
And then when you're dealing with your own personal demons, especially the deep drug demons, seem to produce some of the most insane music ever.
Yeah, and I have a songwriter friend who is convinced that you can't really produce something that is, you know, really noteworthy unless you have some kind of an addiction issue.
I don't know if that's true, but you're saying that very thing.
You look back at history of rock and roll and music in general, there's a lot of heavy drugs and a lot of getting out there on the edge that has in fact produced some of the greatest music that we've ever heard.
Well, that is him, but it's also everybody that's before him.
Oh, yeah.
And he's probably the one guy that we have in modern times that really can carry that torch for the blues and all those great guitar players that we don't have a lot of them left.
I mean, he can do that, and that's real kind of, you know, B.B. King approach, you know, just playing some real straight-in-line stuff.
But then he can do Hendrix and be crazy and psychedelic, too.
In no way am I an authority on jazz, but if it's on, I will enjoy it.
Because I enjoy, as a musician, I enjoy, just like I enjoy great blues players, there's so many great musicians in jazz.
Like I had an opportunity...
To write some songs.
Dan Wilson called me up one time to go write some songs with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
And so we wrote some songs.
I knew nothing about New Orleans jazz whatsoever, but I went down to New Orleans and I participated in this and wrote these songs that now live in the jazz world.
So that really is thrilling to me to get to that thing I was telling you about where I get to go hop into somebody else's space and see if I'm helpful.
That's cool to me, you know.
So now I have, you know, I have that.
It feels like, to me, like that's a feather in my cap.
I got to go participate with those guys, and they're so great, every one of them.
I have some friends that love that sort of collaboration thing, too, whether it's in music.
I have a good buddy of mine who writes a lot, my friend Tony Hinchcliffe, writes a lot for people for roasts, and he does punch-up on shows and things along those lines, but he relishes that opportunity.
He likes collaborating, likes helping people out on stuff.
I've done it in Hawaii, in Mexico, and the great thing is, say, if you're staying at a resort, you could rent a boat, they'll take you out, you catch a tuna or something like that, and then you cook it and eat it for lunch, and it's amazing.
It's weird that we, it's this weird thing that we have in our head where we're trying to activate those reward systems that were there in place in order to keep ourselves fed.
Right?
There's a thing that happens when you catch a fish.
Like I've seen with my little kids, I've taken my daughter's fishing, and when they catch a fish, they have this look on their face like, oh, oh, I got it, I got it, I got it!
It's super exciting when they pull it out of the boat, and then the fact that they're going to get to eat it later, there's some weird primal DNA thing that gets activated when you catch something.
And I think that's what these fly fishermen that are letting the fish go are trying to do.
They're just little junkies for that feeling, that DNA activation, that reward system thing.
And obviously it's difficult, and obviously there's a tremendous amount of skill and finesse involved in fly casting and roll casting and trying to place this...
Fly right in this little pool and drag it with the current and get that nasty trout to bite onto it.
But you also want to own it.
You want to have him and let him go.
You don't want to say, I could have had you but there's no hook on that.
A good percentage, I don't know what the number is, especially when you're like salmon fishing and you're using like heavy tackle, a good percentage if you're catching and releasing that those fish are never going to make it.
Catch them with a big lure, barbed hooks, you get them deep in the throat, you pull them out, their gills are bleeding.
Well, that's one of the things that they talk about in terms of the future of protein, that insects provide very complex, complete proteins, and they can provide it to large amounts of people fairly inexpensively.
Like, I think if you're around a real wild game chef, like there's a guy named Hank Shaw who's been on this podcast before who's a hunter who's also like a real extraordinary chef, and he makes these amazing dishes with wild game.
And he's one of those guys that's like, you know, you think it's bad because you haven't cooked it right.
Yeah, we've been here a few days and we got in two or three days ago and we've been doing some other things, TV things, whatever, but waking up to that on the news is not a fun thing to watch and I'm so heartbroken for everybody losing their homes and it's a pretty tragic, awful thing to have to watch.
It so rarely rains here, you know, and when you get, like, these crazy winds, the Santa Ana winds that happen every year, just, this is extraordinary, the winds here, and just perfect time for fires, obviously.
All during the same crazy conditions and they happen like way far apart from each other So you talk to firefighters about it and they're like there's a lot of times We don't know but there's a lot of times some serious suspicions.
Yeah, you know, it's just It's unfortunate you would have to think about that.
I mean think about all these human beings and there's one or two or however whatever the number is that are so tortured And so in pain and so fucked up, the wires are so crossed.
But I watched all these guys on the news, you know, up on the roofs trying to save their property or, you know, firefighters putting themselves in harm's way or guys flying helicopters dumping water in zero visibility conditions.
I think all his years of working regular jobs, you know, working on the railroad and doing all the shit that he had to do, when success came, he was like, Jesus Christ, I've got to keep this fire going.
You have this moment, you know, when you have a little something going on where you're like, well, I've got to, you know, make hate while the sun's shining.
I understand that wholeheartedly.
But, you know, we're only human beings and we all have limits.
Yeah, what I've heard about Nashville is that Nashville started out as sort of this pure sort of music environment and then over time it became a money grab and people realized that it's a music environment and they said how do we capitalize on this and then people said oh I heard this is a music environment I'm gonna move there and then it became like a place to be to be seen and that it's it's still got the music there but it's it's also like weirdly compromised does that make sense?
Yeah, I think that's some kind of unicorn that you're inventing in your mind if you think that that's any town that you're going to.
It's like, I don't know, I don't know what the equivalent would be, but feeling like you moved to some island somewhere and everybody walks around and has yachts and just drinks martinis all day or whatever.
Well, there's places that you're supposed to go to.
When I was in Boston, when I first started out doing stand-up, I'd heard about the Comedy Store.
That was like the Mecca.
You had to get to the Comedy Store in Hollywood.
It was like spoken with hushed tones.
And everybody sort of came to that place.
It drew everybody in from across the country.
And from my friends, like Honey Honey and other people that I know that lived in Nashville for a while, Nashville was kind of that to them.
What it was, was this kind of It's a place where you'd seen and heard so much amazing music has come out of that part of the world, and it's so music-centered.
It has a different vibe, because it's a very artistic city.
But there's also a side to it now, and it's been in the last five...
Sorry, Nashville, if you feel like I'm talking about you, but there's a thing now where you go downtown, and It's more like you're going to a giant bachelorette party or something.
It's just like everybody's, I don't know, just looking to drink their face off and listen to bad covers.
But it's, you know, and it's great for the city in a lot of ways, tourism-wise and monetarily and all those things, but it also changes that, whatever, some notions of that romantic thing that you're talking about.
Those things still exist, but they have to be, like a lot of things that have sold, they need to be sought out.
My point about all of it really is the idea of artistic integrity is a fleeting thing and a sacred thing and a critical thing for a guy like you to create the kind of music that you make.
And I'm always interested like how someone cultivates that.
How someone protects that.
Because I think it's what goes away.
When things go off the rails, it's usually the focus away from the creative aspect of it, the art.
Making the thing that you loved in the beginning when you got into this thing.
And, you know, but there's also, you know, there's a side of that I would argue that maybe that is what's in their heart at that moment and that's just as real as anything else, you know?
For me, if there's a way to try to preserve some notion of integrity, it's just that thing I was saying earlier.
It's just like, if you let all the other stuff just...
Put the blinders on and go, all right, here I am.
Here are the guys that I play music with and the girls.
We're going to sit in the room.
What are we going to do?
What will we do if none of this other stuff existed?
And that's the way you keep it.
where it should be.
As you keep it right in the moment and right in the room and don't let some notion of trying to outdo yourself or outsell yourself or, you know, make more money than the other guy or have a number make more money than the other guy or have a number one over top of the other or, you know, because all that kind of stuff is manufactured too, like number ones.
Those are just numbers.
And some of them are so tainted by people just doing things that manufacture that number that they want to have that it's not even a real thing at that point.
Well, I just think that the Oscars and the Grammys and all that kind of shit, I don't give a fuck who you think is great.
I don't care who you think is the great at number one.
And the winner is...
Open the envelope.
Oh my god, is he going to get it?
The work is the work.
The work is done.
Apocalypse Now is a great fucking movie.
It doesn't matter if you give him a gold statue or not.
What's the work?
The work is great.
For it to win a thing or not win a thing.
You know, and some of the things that have won, you can tell that the win is tainted by the political climate, that the people are, like, leaning towards something that's socially aware and kind.
So somebody made a movie with lesbians that saved the planet from, you know what I mean?
It's like, that kind of shit becomes, like, transparent and obvious, and you can do that and rig the system and win an award.
I think that awards for art are goofy.
Awards for comedy or every comedy competition I've ever seen, they're super goofy.
It's missing the whole idea of the thing.
The whole idea of the thing is supposed to be the art.
The other good moments are like when they have American Idol and they have those people that have no business being there and they play their auditions too.
Those are the other good moments for the wrong reasons, right?
You're telling me about all these artists I've got to go look into, and I'm sure there's a bunch that are coming up that are probably equally talented, and maybe they just need an opportunity like that.
Something along those lines, some sort of a show, a variety show where really talented people can come out and show their songs.
Yeah, but all these guys that you see animated, these are the real guys that lived a lot of these things and are telling these stories.
These are not made up characters in any way and I know some of the guys that wind up being animated on these things and And I have for years said, you know, if even half of the folklore that exists in country music could be told, it would be the biggest thing in the world, you know?
And that's what he's doing right now with that show, and he's doing an excellent job of it, and it's really...
For me, and maybe it's not as entertaining to other people, I don't know, but for me as a musician, knowing some of the folklore and knowing how many great characters and storytellers exist in country music and have existed, it's so refreshing to see these guys get stories told about them.
I'm hopeful that we get to continue to do some cool things and have fun doing it.
I'm at that age where I'm just old enough not to be stupid with what we're doing and hopefully young enough to really get to keep doing it for a little while.
You know, I don't know, man.
I'm grateful for anything that we've gotten to do and we'll get to do in the future, and hopefully the next few years will just be a continuation of that.
I mean, but you know, when you start, and I don't know how it works from your end what you do, when you start And when you get your first little, you know, I get a publishing deal and you get to be around some of what an industry is.
And then you slowly but surely get to meet people who are successful in different facets of it.
And I think what I find is the people that I gravitate towards and that I really respect and look at and go, A career like that would be nice.
They're very nice caring, giving individuals who support younger artists and they do nice things for their communities and they do nice things for people out in the world.
And they make music that's in their heart.
And those are the things that I think are good to aspire to as a musician.
I say write as much as you can with as many people as you can find who know what they're doing.
And that's how you learn how to write songs.
But I'll also say, I used to have a songwriter friend who said, you can't learn how to be a songwriter.
You can learn how to write better songs more often.
But it's not, you know, it's like, and forgive me if this is a wrong analogy, but I don't think you can really learn how to be funny if you're a comedian.
And I think if you are in a position where you are incapable of writing songs or incapable of being funny or incapable of writing books or doing paintings, whatever it is, it's because of whoever you are right now.
But that doesn't mean that whoever you are right now is who you're going to be five years from now or whatever.
I think if you can go through enough personal growth and enough introspective thinking and objective realization of your environment and the way you interface with people slowly but surely changes and evolves and matures, your art will, your expression will, because you're not who you were.
But there has to be some element of spark or drive, even.
I think, would you say that if the person that was trying to be funny was not funny at first, they at least knew that they weren't funny and had to get better at it?
Sometimes they think they're funny and then they become funny.
I used to think that there was much more of a clear, defined pattern than I think now.
But I think it's about being clueless.
I think cluelessness is the enemy of anything that you're going to make that's going to have a real impact on people, if you're clueless.
If you don't see how people perceive you, if you're not aware of how they're taking you in when you're communicating with them, your art is going to suck.
You don't have a connection with them.
You don't have a connection with people.
You don't have a connection with yourself.
I think...
Unless there's some sort of a solitary thing that you do, like maybe sculpting or painting, like you could be a madman who's totally in your own world and create some crazy art form that someone can come along and look at and go, wow.
But anything where you're interacting with people, I think there's a big part of that interaction is...
The way you look through other people's eyes and the way they take in what you're saying, not just what you want to get out, but also your recognition, whether peripherally or whether it's obviously, your realization of how they're perceiving your thoughts and ideas and what vehicle you're delivering these ideas in.
Is it clunky and too loud, or do you have the same thought and make it smooth and calm and sinking into people with The right words and the right cadence and the right...
You can have the same ideas, but they just need a better vehicle to get through.
And I think cluelessness prevents you from objectively analyzing your own work.
Yeah, I think if you're doing ten percent of what you do is work that you deem good enough to put out in the world, I think you're probably doing pretty good.
I mean, I think that's a pretty good average of things that are worth something.
You hope for better, but if you're doing that, I think that's doing your job.
I also believe you've got to go through some of the ones that aren't there just to kind of flush them out.
Do you ever come back to your stuff, like sort of almost like come back to it when you haven't thought about it in forever and look at it with fresh eyes, almost like you're collaborating with somebody else and redoing their stuff?
And they've written some songs that I think are fantastic.
And I really do appreciate them.
But I'm completely impatient writing songs.
I feel like...
You know, my favorite songs are ones that just kind of fall down out of the sky in a bolt of lightning, and you write it in about 10 minutes, and you're like, that's exactly what it was supposed to be.
Yeah, well, and I'm not saying that I haven't tried many different ways to make things happen, but I find, you know, for me, the process of clarity works better than trying to alter myself to get to some other plane.
Maybe there is another plane I don't know about, but I've never been there.
Some guys write in bit form, like they say, so, the other day I walk, and they write it out like that.
And other guys would just, like, say clocks, like the idea of clocks, like the arbitrary decision that we all made, that there's You know, these little numbers around this dial.
It's a minute is this amount of time.
And you'll just start writing all these different things.
And out of that, you might write a whole essay.
Out of that, you might have one paragraph that makes sense.
Like one quick one-liner about time.
Maybe it's an answer to a pretentious friend.
It's like, there is no time, man.
Well, if you fucking show up late and you get fired, it's time for you to get a new job, bitch.
That could be a way where you could take time and just take this big essay on it and you would extract an idea that could eventually be humor on stage.
It's like whatever your end goal is, whatever you're trying to create, it's all about showing up and doing that work and staring at it and trying to figure it out.
And then for comedy, it's a lot about getting in front of the crowds.
You got to work a lot.
If you don't work a lot, it's not going to work.
It just won't.
You have to be out there.
You can't just create comedy on your own, whereas I think you with a bunch of talented musicians, you could probably develop a fucking jamming record before anybody ever got a chance to see it.
You know, I don't know that I'd ever specifically do something to get material out of it, but I do do things because Something comes up and I go that sounds so weird.
I'm gonna go do that and then from that and then from that Either good things happen or I have a story that yeah sounds like it's fake That might be the best way to do it right to just live a happy Fulfilled life and mine that happy fulfilled life for ideas rather than chase Interesting things with a specific intention of turning them into creativity Yeah,
no, I don't think I'd ever do that, but I'd definitely, I'd go do things that might make me uncomfortable or, you know, put myself in situations where, like, this sounds like the weirdest thing ever.
Like what?
Well, you know, case in point, and it turned out to be, you know, we're now good friends, but, you know, the first time I ever met Timberlake...
Playing the guitar is one of those things where you never think that you're ever getting any better at it until one day you wake up and you understand something that you didn't understand and hadn't understood for the ten years you've been trying to understand it.
And then all of a sudden you have this new You know, new space to live in on it.
I kind of understand the space you're talking about and I think that applies to a lot of different things.
You know, there's this Miyamoto Musashi quote that I use all the time.
Once you understand the way broadly, you see it in all things.
And that this place that you're talking about, like these new level places, like that exists in martial arts, it exists in comedy, it exists in writing, it exists in...
I'm sure it exists in music, although I don't do music.
I think this thing of this Zen samurai thing you're talking about, of just like this constant focus until you reach some new understanding of the thing.
I don't belong in Gary Clark Jr. world or anything like that, but I do love guitar enough to know that I'm always playing enough to try to find that new space to live.
And that's the coolest thing in the world to me, because I'll never get to whatever...