Quotes by Chris Stapleton

It's such a strange marriage, a song and someone that sings it. When that works, it really works, and when it doesn't, it doesn't.

Anyone who says it's so easy to write a country hit and that it's just a formula -- well, try it sometime. If it was that easy, everybody would be doing it.

I love music so much, and I love musicians -- I love singers. It's fun. That's what music's supposed to be. Fun.

I'm a fan of records. I'm a fan of listening to something cover to cover and not wanting to skip over anything.

The show isn't about screens, and we don't have any video content or lasers or things blowing up. I want people to come to our show to listen. I want the show to be the music.

I don't look at it as mainstream country versus outsider.

I am always interested in making myself as uncomfortable as I can. Sometimes I ask myself, 'Can I stand onstage and sing this song and sell it?' Sometimes I can't. In a room, you get to pretend a little bit and step outside of yourself.

If I'm feeling like rock, we'll do some of that, and if I'm feeling some other way, we might do some of that. So, that's typically how I record and write and play music and anything else.

I like the old days when, if I wrote a song and I recorded it, it didn't mean somebody else couldn't record it.

When you're writing with an artist or for an artist, you have to help them serve their vision. That's the cool part about writing songs. There are no rules.

I moved to Nashville to be a songwriter. I found out that was a job, that someone would pay you to sit in a room with a guitar and make up songs! It is the greatest job in the world. I wrote three or four songs a day. That's what I lived for.

It's nice to see people invest in what you do as an artist and sing the songs back at you and feel something. You get to feel something more than what you were feeling when you made the record.

If you think about what everyone else will think, you forget to just make music.

I'm only worried about what I'm doing or how I present music. I just try to do things I want to listen to, and I think that's what everybody else is try doing, too.

I always like to write the songs, and they get turned loose into the world, and who knows what happens to them. That's the joy of being a songwriter. You get to hear what other people do, interpretation-wise.

I like to fish. I collect pocketknives. I inherited a nice collection from my father and grandfather.

I'm not going to ask musicians to sit there and pretend to play. It feels insulting to the musicians to me.

I think it's OK if somebody likes my music and likes Sam Hunt's music, too. And I think if we're both selling records, it's good for everybody. I think it allows other records to get made.

There are great songs out there, and if I love them, and I know them, I'm going to sing them just because that's what songs are for.

I always feel that if you're going to cover a song, you should make it your own and flip it on its head.

I grew up less than a mile from folks that lived in shacks with dirt floors. I certainly know that there are needs in this country. Not too far from your house, if you look around, people need to be helped.

I want the dude in the top row to feel like he's down there on the front row in a club.

If I have a talent, it lies in the creative process.

I used to spend my money on going to Tom Petty concerts.

The curse of being a songwriter is that's you're always at work. I could look out the window right now and see something that would make me want to write.

For me, the more time you can take and the more care you can take with songs, the better off you're going to be.

I had a beard way before it was fashionable.

If there's one kind of music that makes somebody happy, how is that a bad thing? And if there's another kind that makes somebody else happy, how is that a bad thing? I don't get why anybody cares about what they don't like so much.

I never was a liner note junkie. I didn't know who produced records or there was such a thing as a straight songwriter. I always assumed that everybody that was singing a song wrote it or made it up.

America's military allow the rest of us to do what we do.

Whether you like modern incarnations of what country radio hits are, or you like what I'm doing, or you like something really off in folk, poetry Americana land, it's all just music, man. If you like one of them, great -- go buy it.

Everybody's got a story on their beards. I guess it's just a way of finding common ground with people you otherwise might not know.

I can pass myself off as a 'Duck Dynasty' impersonator a lot.

Why would you want to dictate somebody else's taste or happiness? Music is supposed to be joyful and move people, and however that gets accomplished for different people, it's all good.

Among my dad's generation, when you gave another man a pocketknife as a gift, it was a show of respect. I'll still give someone the knife out of my pocket.

I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I'm not Chuck Berry or Bill Monroe. Guys like that are from outer space.

Everybody gets through a phase where it's, 'Ah, if I could just sound just like Vince Gill.' Then you figure out that you have your own voice, whether you like it or not, and that's what you should stick with.

If you go in RCA A, you'll realize that it's not just a Nashville thing. It's a studio that belongs to music.

I was a car salesman, if you can believe it.

I didn't have any expectations with 'Traveller' -- I don't think anybody did. That's how I prefer the process to be.

I don't feel like songs should be hoarded. I don't feel like one's tainted if somebody else does it. That's the mark of artistry -- take a song that's maybe even a really popular song and do it your own way. I think that's cool.

Great musicians are great musicians, whether they're playing a trombone or an electric guitar or a xylophone.

I always just try to write the best songs that I can at any given time, and sometimes those songs are for me, and sometimes they're for other people. And that's to be evaluated after the fact.

I don't know that my voice ever makes sense anywhere, necessarily. I would sing bluegrass music, and I don't fit in there; I would sing rock music, and I'm probably a little too hillbilly for that. And country, I'm too much rock n' roll for there sometimes.

It's a unique thing, and it's probably the thing I love most about songs and music -- their ability to connect in a human way.

I'm always just looking to get back to the joy of playing music, and keeping it simple, as much as I can.

College didn't stick, so I worked odd jobs, but I've always written songs and played music. I actually met a guy who was a songwriter, which I didn't realize was a real job.

Anybody who has ever played in bars has played 'Keep Your Hands to Yourself.' It's a monumental piece of rock and roll. It makes you feel exactly like rock and roll is supposed to make you feel.

I think, at some point, all of us -- I'm gonna speak personally, not for everybody else -- you're gonna feel like a one-trick pony, and you might even be a one-trick pony. But at some point, if it's a really good trick, everybody's still gonna appreciate it.

Country music is one of those places where we support each other and prop each other up.

I was in a bluegrass band. I made two records with a band called the SteelDrivers. They were nominated for two Grammys. I then I was in a rock band called the Junction Brothers; we made kind of '70s hard rock music.

The first time you listen to someone else's interpretation of what you've created, it's a little unnerving. They'll change lyrics or something almost every time. That's them being an artist, and you appreciate it more over time.

I was writing waltzes at a time when the most popular thing was Shania Twain and the very pop edge of country. I didn't really know how to do much of that.

My wife has great taste in everything but men. The vast majority of the songs on my debut album, 'Traveller,' came from lists she made.

I grew up in eastern Kentucky, and we would sing in the churches, and there's lots of good mountain church singers out there. Like a lot of folks who turn out to be secular music artists, that's a lot of the training you put in, whether you know it or not.

My favorite record of all time is Tom Petty's 'Wildflowers.' I hold it as the standard -- in terms of sonics, sequencing, and songs. It shows that making a complete record is important, rather than just making a single.

At the end of the day, I just have to do what I do and let it be what it's gonna be.

Anytime that another artist or a critic that is well-respected says something nice about you, you're always thankful and hope that you can live up to that.

I like to put a record on and then listen to it again and then sit down and make my friends listen to it.

We have a history in country music of writing about the darker side of things -- maybe not as much in modern times, but there's a lot of cheating and self-deprecation. We sort it out in song, in country music, as a genre.

I like to put something on and want to listen to it again once I get done listening to it, not feel like I need an ear break.

I like things that don't sound particularly processed or mechanical or made by machines. I like music that contains human elements, with all their flaws. There's air in it, and you can hear a room of a bunch of guys playing. Those are the magic parts.

I just try to make the best music that I can. People are going to label it whatever they're going to label it.

I'm always trying to do as many different things as I can, just so when one is not doing so hot, maybe the other is still there.

I like songs that make me feel tough. Like 'Back in Black.' You want to hear it again and get in a fight.

I went to college a little bit, and that didn't work out, and I didn't finish. So, I would play in bars until I ran out of money, and then I'd get a real job.

I don't look at family and what I do for a living as separate things. They're all kind of one thing, and this is part of their life just like it's part of mine.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

It is a really interesting to hear yourself on the radio. I've gotten to hear myself in different capacities. I've heard myself on Sirius XM on the bluegrass channels, and on WSM and other places.

I was born in Fayette County, over in Lexington, Kentucky, but I was raised most of my life in Paintsville.

I was in a band called the SteelDrivers, and we just played hard in vans, hopping on airplanes, not knowing where you're at.

My dad was a very straight arrow, prayed-at-every-meal kind of guy.

I walked into a demo session one time, and a guy said, 'I'm thinking kind of like a Trace Adkins thing.' And I looked him right in the eye and said, 'Man, you've got the wrong guy. I'm gonna have to fire myself. You've got to hire somebody else.'

I can only be me. I have a hard time being a chameleon as a singer.

A lot of great bluegrass comes out of Kentucky. There's a lot of great music, like the Judds, Billy Ray Cyrus, Ricky Skaggs, and Keith Whitley. There's a lot of bluegrass intertwined with country music.

I always tell people, 'The music's free. I get paid to travel.'

I'm not a hustler. I don't pitch songs. I don't ask people to write with me. It's not what I do.

In the kind of fast-food world that we live in, where everything's so fast paced and it's, 'Look over here! Look over there,' we don't really take the time to sit down and enjoy music -- or anything else, for that matter.

I write the songs and hand it over to the world and see what happens. But the things that I've written for people that have been hits, I don't know that I would have directed them in the right path, but they definitely wound up on the right path.

I'm a fan of polarization. If you make something that is palatable to everybody, it's like making vanilla ice cream, and I think we have enough of that.