

And when songs like that came out, it comes out very quickly. And maybe that was me setting a boundary. I think if you examine that song as a relationship between two people and not just a person in a town, everybody has a moment in relationships where you have to kind of set boundaries. KING: That lyric makes me think Nashville was eating you up a little bit. And as far as I can tell, it’s high time I wish you well. STAPLETON: (Singing) So long, Nashville, Tenn. And then in that rental house, 1 o'clock in the morning, this song comes out.

We rented a house down the street just to kind of get away from the bus. You know, no one has ever done anything malicious to me, but it's a little unnerving when you spend 38 years of your life in relative anonymity. And you're out in the front yard trying to kick a ball or, you know, a dude shows up in your driveway from North Carolina because he hunted you down some way. I lived on a street, in a house, in a neighborhood, you know? And then the bus starts coming by with tourists twice a day, you know, 11 and 2. STAPLETON: Well, our lives were changed just a little bit. But certainly when we had our moment on the CMA's with Justin Timberlake where things kind of blew up for us a little bit. Well, I mean, that song didn't necessarily happen in the course of making this record. KING: What is that song about? Is it about you? STAPLETON: (Singing) I met you when I had a dream not so long ago it seems. KING: There's a song on this album called "Nashville, TN" which sounds like it was written by a person who is saying goodbye to a city. And we kind of - as you do with songs sometimes, you kind of write them and you pull it back out and you listen to it and maybe it means something else in a different time, which is - that's what actually gives it life, to me. STAPLETON: I walked in the room and we started talking about how there's times in life when you look at your partner and you kind of got to be like, you know, let's get back down to the basics of it and let's kind of get to the core of it and know that we're going to be OK because we have each other. KING: "Starting Over" seems like a very 2020 sentiment but the song actually came to Chris and his writing partner much earlier. You can be my four leaf clover, starting over. STAPLETON: (Singing) I can be your lucky penny. So in 2019, we did that and then we picked back up. Maybe we just need to shut down, write some more or live some more or tour some more. And I was like, you know, maybe this isn't happening. Like, all the power went out in the entire town of Muscle Shoals and. And it seemed like the universe was kind of telling us to shut down. So we booked Muscle Shoals Sound and we went down there for a couple - three days. Sometimes, creatively, you want something - a stimulus of some kind.

There's rivers to cross and hills to climb. He had to take about a year off working on this new album, which is called "Starting Over."ĬHRIS STAPLETON: (Singing) This might not be an easy time. Albums come easy to him, but on his latest, he got blocked. KING: It was a big deal because Stapleton had made a living writing for other artists - these rootsy, gorgeous songs that he told me take him about 10 or 15 minutes to write.

His first record went triple platinum, and he gave this performance with Justin Timberlake at the 2015 Country Music Awards, which, if you've seen it, you remember it.ĬHRIS STAPLETON AND JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE: (Singing) You're as smooth as Tennessee whiskey. Five years ago, Chris Stapleton became a country music superstar.
