Quotes from Chris Stapleton

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

My dad could hold a tune. He wasn't necessarily a singer, but he did love music, and he listened to it quite loud in the car.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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 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.

It's man's work. My dad was gone at 4:30 in the morning and home at 8 at night, and he worked underground, and the last mine he worked in was 26 inches high in a lot of places. He liked the engineering of it - he liked the moving the earth and being able to extract something and put it back for reclamation. He enjoyed the whole process.

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