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Chris Stapleton Says No Songwriter Can Predict A Big Hit: “Those Guys Are Full Of ****”
If anyone knows about a little something about writing hits, it’s Chris Stapleton.
Long before he was the country music superstar that we all recognize today, Chris was just a songwriter, and for him, that was a dream job. The Kentucky native was the valedictorian at his high school, and briefly attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville (pretty good school, eh?) to study… biomedical engineering? Yeah, one of the greatest vocalists country music has ever seen was on track to designing medical equipment… smart dude. But luckily for him, his family, and all of us, he ditched the classroom for the writing room.
Chris wrote hits for megastars like Brad Paisley, Travis Tritt and Gary Allan in the early 2000s, but he really broke out with a couple mega-hits for Josh Turner and Kenny Chesney around 2007. He would go on to pen hits for George Strait, Miranda Lambert, Blake Shelton, Tim McGraw and many more. Of course, he burst onto the scene as a solo artist back in 2015 with his debut album Traveller, which cooled off a few months after its release. But at the CMA Awards later that fall, a duet of “Tennessee Whiskey” alongside pop star Justin Timberlake, sent Chris blasting off on a rocket to the moon… one that still hasn’t landed yet.
And the rest is history…
But for someone as accomplished as Chris is, one who by all accounts has the pedigree of a hit songwriter, he firmly argues that nobody can predict the success of a song… not a writer, not a label, and certainly not a computer program.
A while back, Chris sat down for a big interview with 60 Minutes, and he was asked specifically about his secret to writing a great song, and how you know when you have a real winner on your hands… one that is guaranteed to crush on country radio. And Chris responded saying that it’s really impossible to ever predict what song will resonate with fans until they hear it, because what speaks to people on a deep level in their soul is based on a feeling, not a statistic or spreadsheet:
“I don’t think I ever know that. The win is finishing the song. And there are a lot of songwriters who will claim that they know, ‘Yeah, I knew when we wrote this one that it was a six-week #1 and I was gonna get a big giant check in the mail.’
I really just think those guys are full of ****. I don’t think anybody knows that. Like, you can’t possibly know how everybody’s gonna feel about a song that you write. That’s impossible to know.”
I mean, if they truly did know, wouldn’t they just write mega-hit after mega-hit and keep cashing monster checks? Half of the time, many songwriters don’t even know who is going to wind up cutting it or if it will even be a single. Unless they co-wrote it with a big recording artist like Morgan Wallen or Luke Combs. The truth is, many labels select singles to send to country radio based on early streaming numbers, computer AI models, or data they collect from surveys of small groups of people (focus groups), but Chris thinks it’s all a bunch of nonsense. Of course, there are plenty of examples of artists fighting for the singles they want, like Eric Church threatening to walk over “Smoke A Little Smoke,” but many up and coming artists don’t always have a ton of say in the matter.
Stapleton says he only trusts the people who listen to his music, and he gauges the success of any given single by how it speaks to their heart, the kind of emotion the song elicits in true fans, not casual listeners.
“I don’t trust computer research or phone surveys, or anything like that. You have to take it to the people. I trust people. And I trust people who have taste.”
Keyword… have taste.
At the end of the day, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more genuine or authentic artist than Chris Stapleton.
The post Chris Stapleton Says No Songwriter Can Predict A Big Hit: “Those Guys Are Full Of ****” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.
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