Chris Stapleton toiled for nearly 15 years to become an overnight sensation. After moving to Nashville in the early 2000s, he played in a bluegrass band and co-founded a Southern rock group whose only claim to fame was opening for Zac Brown, all while writing songs for artists like Luke Bryan, Darius Rucker, Blake Shelton, and Lee Ann Womack, among others. He tried his hand at a solo career, releasing a single in 2013 that went nowhere. In 2015, with a new breed of singer-songwriters challenging Nashville’s most ingrained conventions, Stapleton finally released a full album under his own name, Traveller. Revealing a vivid and economical songwriter as well as a soulful and sensitive singer, the album enjoyed only modest sales right up until the night of the Country Music Awards, when he performed with Justin Timberlake and took home the award for Album of the Year, beating out more established acts like Jason Aldean and Little Big Town. He woke up the next morning to a No. 1 album.
In Nashville, a place where traditionalists are treated as the avant-garde, Stapleton quickly eclipsed many of the artists who had previously sung his songs. His success, however, isn’t based on how he envisions the future of country music, but rather how he uses the past. His sentiments and characters are familiar, occasionally giving way to generalities but usually bringing the dignified melancholy of old-school country right up to the present. Musically, he understands that “country” is an inclusive label, one that uses the bristly twang of 1970s outlaw as its foundation but also covers the excitable R&B from Memphis and the Shoals as well as the blues-based Southern rock of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Two years after Traveller turned him into a Nashville institution, From a Room Volume 1 sounded like a non-follow-up when it came out in May: a way to release new music without having to make a big statement or one-up his debut. The tracklist was short, nine songs clocking in at just over 30 minutes. The packaging was minimal, a cardboard sleeve for the CD and a retro insert for the LP. The nondescript title carried a concealed pun, as all the songs were recorded in Room A at the historic RCA Studio in Nashville. Lending that indefinite article even more weight was the fact that the studio had been threatened with demolition while Stapleton was recording Traveller there. Someone thought condos would be a better use of that real estate.
Vol. 1 works as a tribute to that studio, but Stapleton is as interested in personal history as he is in music history. He resurrected songs he’d written years before, some of which had been hits for other people, some of which had been overlooked completely. It sounded more like a minor reclamation project or an abbreviated career retrospective than an actual album, but with the release of From A Room Volume 2, the first collection comes more sharply into focus. Together, they reveal the full scope of his abilities, not only monetizing his vast catalog (he’s written approximately 1,000 songs) but filling in his biography for the uninitiated.
As a songwriter, Stapleton rarely strays from country’s evergreen topics: breaking hearts, breaking the law, breaking the bank. But he tackles them with a graceful economy of language and fine gradients of emotion. Take “Either Way,” off Vol. 1, originally recorded by Lee Ann Womack on her 2008 album Call Me Crazy. Stapleton, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, describes the romantic inertia between lovers who only talk “when the monthly bills are due.” He sings quietly on the verses, as though lost in thought, but his voice rises to a near-shout on the chorus: “We can just go on like this/Say the word, we’ll call it quits.” There’s not a happy ending. In fact, there’s not an ending at all. The last verse makes clear that nothing will change between them.
Stapleton works well with resignation and regret, to the extent that even his raucous weed anthem “Them Stems,” off Vol. 1, offers a chicken/egg conundrum: Is the narrator’s life a shambles because he smokes too much pot, or does he smoke too much pot because his life’s a shambles? The people inhabiting these verses tend to live at the extremes, although the songs fare best when those extremes are familiar and relatable. The doomed inmate on Vol. 1 closer “Death Row” is less a character than an archetype, making it a peculiarly inconsequential contribution to country’s prison song genre. And the multiple generations of farmers on Vol. 2’s “Scarecrow in the Garden” are far less compelling and distinct than the pragmatic alcoholics on “Nobody’s Lonely Tonight,” a Vol. 2 standout. “What’s love but just some illusion we believe,” Stapleton sings, his tone both disgusted and resigned. “What’s love but just some confusion we don’t need.”
He doesn’t mean it, of course. Vol. 2 leavens its heavier moments with songs that celebrate the simple joys of love and marriage and family, without lapsing into sentimentality. “Millionaire,” a cover of a song by fellow writer Kevin Welch, is about how love is worth more than money. “A Simple Song,” penned by Stapleton’s father-in-law, lists off a family’s escalating woes, which include bad health, poverty, and unemployment, until Stapleton admits, “But I love my life/Man, it’s something to see/It’s the kids and the dogs and you and me.” The idea of finding happiness in the face of hardship is not new in country music, and that’s the whole point. What has made him so successful is how Stapleton invests these ideas with gravity and gratitude.
