Chris Stapleton: 'It's a self-therapy session sometimes. If you're a songwriter, that's gonna happen'

Chris Stapleton wanted out of his comfort zone. 

For about a half-decade, the songwriter-turned-superstar built a creative stronghold at RCA Studio A in Nashville.

Between walls that once housed sessions for Waylon Jennings and Loretta Lynn, Stapleton surrounded himself with faithful collaborators and cut some of the most influential – and best-selling – records in modern country music. 

But for his new record, "Starting Over," out Friday via Mercury Nashville/UMG, Stapleton left Nashville – only briefly.

He and the band trekked in winter 2018 to famed Alabama studio Muscle Shoals Sound. He wouldn't be immediately greeted with a comfort felt at Studio A that he compares to putting on a favorite T-shirt. 

"It was a different process for us," Stapleton told The Tennessean. "The room's very much a part of the band, to me, when you're makin' records.

He continued, "All these weird things were going down. The power shut down in all of Muscle Shoals while we were trying to record. There were all these weird stops. I'm a big 'listen to the signs of the universe' guy. We were in this what felt uncomfortable, to me, zone of tryin' to make a record." 

Sometimes pushing boundaries comes with a recoil. 

"I shut it down," Stapleton said. "I said let's tour another year and we'll evaluate this (next winter). We'll get back in RCA and we'll see what we got. And that's what we did." 

A recording process that once took days for the band and longtime producer Dave Cobb extended into years. 

"I was (on tour) with him that year," Cobb said. "He was burning pretty good, and I think everyone was just tired. ... He made a good call there." 

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Stapleton returned last winter to Studio A, where he'd track most of "Starting Over." He finished the album in February, days before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down virtually all of the music industry last spring. 

The 14-song record expands a sonic identity and storytelling fervor that Stapleton established on his paramount debut, "Traveller," and its two-part follow-up, "From A Room Vol. 1" and "Vol. 2." 

"This record has a lot of depth in it," Stapleton said. "It has a lot of variance in tone and music. It feels a little a bit like not a complete departure, but a little different lane to some of the things we've done. But it still very much sounds like the things that we do." 

Turns out, a little distance might've been what the record needed. 

"Sometimes when you have some distance between yourself making something and then you get to listen to it with a fresh perspective you're like, 'That was really good,'" Stapleton said, laughing. "Sometimes your mental state can play tricks on your own mind." 

'It's a self-therapy session sometimes' 

Stapleton bakes "slices of life" into the stories told on "Starting Over." 

In a sonic kinship to Tom Petty's "Wildflowers," the title track hears Stapleton and wife-singing companion Morgane Stapleton batting back today's challenges by looking toward what's ahead. On "Arkansas," he offers a jangly Southern rock road trip through the Ozarks; and he sings of a love untouched by age on "When I'm With You," a song Stapleton started on his 40th birthday. 

With a Stapleton record, "you're getting pure honesty," Cobb said. 

"You get so much truth and honesty," Cobb said. "When he's tellin' you a story, nothing feels contrived. Nothing feels pre-meditation. It just comes out of him." 

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Stapleton dedicated one particularly crushing number to Maggie, the family dog of 14 years. Stapleton penned the tribute to his "fuzzy black pup" shortly after her death, he said. 

On "Maggie's Song," he takes listeners to a farm where the pup kept his kids safe from harm and "took off like a bullet" to play in the snow. He ends the song by reminding listeners that "I never knew a better dog/ I guess I never will." 

"Every word and every stitch of that song is real things," Stapleton said. "She was a member of the family, and she deserved a song." 

In the year between Muscle Shoals and returning to Studio A, Stapleton's songwriting circle grew to include Mike Campbell, longtime guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. 

Look up the definition of "cool," Stapleton said, and you'd find Campbell. 

"He's written so many cool things," Stapleton said. "He's a writer on things that people don't even realize, and he's my favorite guitar player of all-time." 

They'd finish "Watch You Burn," a scathing tear-down of mass shooters that Stapleton began after the 2017 killings at Route 91 Harvest, a country music festival, in Las Vegas. 

In one verse, he sings: "I wasn't there/ I didn't see/ But I had friends in your company/ If I could snap my fingers/ If I could flip a switch/ I'd make that last bullet your first/ You son of a (expletive)" 

In the chorus, Stapleton bellows that "devil gonna watch you burn." He drives the message home with Campbell on guitar and the All Voices gospel choir building the track to a blistering uproar. 

Stapleton said, "It's a self therapy session sometimes. Sometimes that's all (a song's) for. They're not for anything else, other than that. If you're a songwriter that's gonna happen on occasion." He added: "Mike listened and ... really got it to a place where he made me feel like it was not a song that was meant to be in my pocket." 

For the album, Stapleton enlisted another Heartbreaker, Benmont Tench, to play Hammond B3 organ on a handful of songs. 

"Cold," one of the numbers featuring Tench, was cut in part at Muscle Shoals. Adding string arrangements and Tench's organ touch after his trip to Alabama, Stapleton embraces theatrics – accompanied by a world-class guitar solo – previously unheard on his original work.

"Maybe I wasn't feeling it then, but maybe I wasn't hearing it then," Stapleton said. "That song and how it turned out, it's probably my favorite thing on the record."

'That song can do both'

Stapleton visited a second Nashville studio, Compass Sound (formerly Hillbilly Central), to record "Whiskey Sunrise" and "Old Friends," a Guy Clark cover. He cut three covers for the album, including "Worry B Gone," a Clark tune, and John Fogerty's "Joy Of My Life." 

On "Worry B Good," he transformed Clark's acoustic jaunt into a full band throwback rock 'n' roll stomper. 

"There's two things I like to find on a record," Stapleton said. "One is a shuffle and the other one is a song about smokin' pot. That song can do both."

The album closes with "Nashville, TN," a song Stapleton began after "somebody threw a match" in 2015 on the fire he'd been building as a solo artist – a reference to the singer breaking out that year at the CMA Awards thanks in part to an explosive Justin Timberlake collaboration. 

Stapleton felt "a little displaced" after his newfound success.

He and his family moved into a rental house down the street from their former home to avoid a barrage of tourist bus stops. On top of maneuvering fame, landmarks of a Nashville he knew – the publishing house where he wrote most of his catalog and the first studio where he witnessed a record being made – had been torn down. 

On the ballad, he sings, "So long, Nashville, Tennessee/ You can't have what's left of me ... You built me up/ You set me free." 

"I'm grateful to everyone who's listened to records and bought records," Stapleton said. "I'm not complaining in any way, shape or form. But it was a strange space for me to be in and all of us to live through." 

He now lives south of Nashville, far removed from a tourist bus stop. 

Like pulling the plug on a studio session that didn't fit, some decisions sound best months later. 

"You gotta make those tough decisions," Stapleton said about the record. "You know in your heart that it means you get to a better decision or a better outcome than you can even see in the moment."