We had all met up for dinner in Santa Fe a couple of years ago. It was Chris, Morgane, me, my wife Kathryn and several band and crew members very close to Clan Stapleton. It was a humbling night in that no matter the status of our perceived successes, we all seemed to resort to naked-in-a-dream, childish reactions when the stress mounted. But in sticking with said dinner, it turned out full of a nectar that ended the night in everyone’s favor.

The owner and maître d’ of this Mexican restaurant came in on his day off, a little tipsy, I think, sporting a rhinestone-studded cowboy hat, and he welcomed us with grand sweeping gestures, overenunciating as he introduced each course with a rolling monologue. After his many waiters (one assigned to each of us) served us with aristocratic flair, he instructed us, with great drama, to, basically, pick up our spoons.

“Break the outer coating!” We did. “Now spoon up a small portion of every color on your dish. Every color!” We did as we were told. “And on the count of three put it in your mouth.” He was whispering at this point. We were getting scared. “One!” I looked up at Chris across the table from me, and his mouth, behind his beard and mustache, was neither grinning nor frowning, but something twisted in between. “Two!” We all had our spoons at exactly the same height, most shaking. After a long pause… “Three! In!”

Like Willy Wonka, the owner knew ­precisely what was happening — delectable, divine, an otherworldly Disney ride in our mouths — as it happened. “You will next be getting a slight chile burn in the back half of the inside of your cheeks riiiiight now!” He was spot on. This was sorcery, Mexican f–king magic.

I had a similar feeling when I heard Chris play for the first time so many years ago at the Ryman, but I never put the two together until now.

It was 2017, and I was in Nashville promoting a film, and Kathryn and I were asked if we wanted to go see Chris Stapleton. “Who’s that?” I asked. Then, that night, I was slapped in the face with that visceral charge I hadn’t felt in music in that familial of a way since I was a kid.

Chris and Morgane Stapleton are country rock stars. There’s no question about it. Since I was 8 years old, a boot-toting rancher’s hanger-on at The Palomino Club in Los Angeles with my parents watching the likes of Marty Robbins, Waylon Jennings, Charley Pride, Mel Tillis and the great Willie Nelson, I have sought whatever that thing is that Chris and Morgane ooze: the presentation toward fans as family, and an added innate strut that suggests there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye.

I text Kenny Chesney that I’ll soon be seeing Chris and Morgane, and he replies right away: “I love them. Say hello for me. He’s a gift from God. He wrote a big song for me called ‘Never Wanted Nothing More.’ It put a lot of gas in the bus, for sure.”

Chris has also written songs for the likes of Blake Shelton, Tim McGraw, Sheryl Crow and Luke Bryan. But as a performer, something drives him. When I look at early videos of him sitting bespectacled and beardless, singing as if he is possessed, it hits me with both awe and envy and I, like him, am transported into the song-glory. I am living it while he is belting it free from wherever it sat in wait until now:

“Oh, why you gotta be so cold?
Why you gotta go and cut me like a knife
And put our love on ice?
Girl, you know you left this hole
Right here in the middle of my soul
Oh-oh, oh, why you gotta be so cold?”

The “Cold” lyrics are simple and straightforward. The song sounds as much like a calling out to God as to the Devil himself, and it surpasses the cosmetics of how we all pretend we live broken love into what it’s actually like as we scratch at our faces and write the 15th letter in hopes of reconciliation.

Today, we are in Nashville. Kathryn and I flew here, then drove to a big metal warehouse where Chris and his band practice. Inside, there’s an eclectic mishmash of fan art, memorabilia, Grammys and awards of all sorts strewn about; paintings of a smiling Dolly Parton and an ingenue Audrey Hepburn; and there is a back room with a collection of guitars reaching into the hundreds, an obsession of his. This place was a rental during the coronavirus pandemic where Chris could perform remotely, but over the years they’ve grown attached to it, happily purchased it, and it’s where everything musically happens now. It’s theirs, very theirs. Poncho, who manages the place, sees us in. And there they are, Chris and Morgane, standing with open arms. They show us around, and we get the awkwards out. When we eventually leave a couple of hours later, Morgane’s sneaking a cigarette outside, waving.

The next morning, when Chris and Morgane walk in at around 11:30, I’m sitting on the couch draped with Native American blankets stuffing guitar picks into my pocket. There’s no reason to do it. I could just ask and I’m sure Chris would give me a thousand of them — but something about stealing them just feels right.

“You want to listen to the new song?” Morgane asks. She turns on a high-­fidelity record player that suddenly bellows a raw duet with Miranda Lambert through the room. The song immediately has Morgane and me dancing on the disco floor that they just laid, the one used in their “Think I’m In Love With You” video. I’m no Rick Rubin but it just has that thing that makes you move, that everybody can’t help but want to play again and again. He keeps surprising us (and himself, I’m sure) with who he chooses to work with: Taylor Swift, Adele, Justin Timberlake (the video for his “Say Something” featuring Chris might be the best music video I’ve ever seen, as a one-take, anything-can-go-wrong vibe gone right in every way). “This is amazing!” Kathryn yells from behind her camera. Chris is off meandering through his gaggle of guitars.

I ask Morgane to play it again and I sit down at a drum set surrounded by speakers. Chris grabs a chair to sit in that I later find out he brought with him when he first came to Nashville. “My mom recovered the seat pad sometime in the ’90s, but this is one out of four we had when I was a kid,” he says. “I brought this one with me. It’s so uncomfortable. I don’t know. I like it.”

He gets up and takes me into a long closet on the other side of the room.

“Lemme show you something,” he says.

The double door is locked, and I can see Morgane smiling as I pass her. Poncho unlocks it and we walk into what feels like miles of guitar cases, wall to wall. Chris finally stops at one that isn’t particularly a standout: “And this.” He pulls, then slowly opens it as if he’s revealing One-Eyed Willy’s personal hidden treasure; I even half expect at this point to see a golden-amber glow of some sort coming from inside. And there it is: an acoustic 1950s Gibson LG-2 steel string. It’s worn and scratched and looks like it’s trying to speak but is too old to.

“This is the first guitar I ever bought after I got to Nashville. I bought it for $380.”

He holds it up.

“Where’d you buy it?” I ask.

“Chambers guitar store, which I don’t think exists anymore.”

He runs his hand over it, almost longingly.

“There is nothing about it that is precious to anybody else. It’s got a million crack repairs. There was even mud in it when I first bought it, I think.”

“Except it means everything to you,” I say.

“That’s right.”

There are silences between us that will come and go all day, natural silences that come from people not needing to fill space all the time. This is one of those moments. I relish it. I don’t look at my phone. I don’t really look at him. Morgane and Kathryn are talking outside, and Poncho is getting himself a glass of water.

“If I had to walk out of here with one thing, it would be this. All the other stuff — I would be sad about it — but whatever I’ve done, whatever I’ve made, whatever I’ve turned into has pretty much been built on this thing.”

And for the first time this morning, he smiles. Then he walks out of the storage closet, leaving me in there holding his old friend.

Chris sits back down in his chair, his arm now around a 1976 bicentennial Gibson Firebird that Tom Petty used to play a month of shows at The Fillmore in the ’90s. The vibrato chords and Travis picking are coming through a shoulder-high amp that I find out later is the one that Jimmy Page used when Zeppelin toured America for the first time in 1969, a Rickenbacker Transonic. The amplifier that rests on top belonged to John Lennon. I’m not much of a drummer, but I return to sit behind the drum kit in the middle of the room and try and hold a beat… and Stapleton starts riffing. What the hell?!

After a while we stop and he looks at me. “It’s the buzz I look for. That buzz that starts with me then connects me to the band that connects to the audience then back around. I’m always looking for that electrical current.

“I had no voice before, no guitar skills,” he continues. “But something drove me to it. My uncle had a regional band, so maybe that. My dad listened to all the great country too — Waylon, Willie, Merle Haggard — but he also played R&B: Otis Redding and Ray Charles. He loved all of it. So music was always there, but sports became less prevalent, and the music just stayed.”

Chris grew up in Kentucky with big dreams of being a football player: “I couldn’t watch ball for years because it just hurt too much.”

“Were you a good football player?”
“I thought I was.”
“But something happened?”
“Nope.”
“It’s a sensitive subject.”
“Not so much anymore.”
“But it was.”
“Yes, it was.”

We speak about what keeps him grounded to his roots, as he’s accumulated 11 Grammys, 15 Academy of Country Music Awards (including 2025’s male artist of the year honor), five Billboard Music Awards and 16 Country Music Association Awards. His latest album, Higher, won the ACM award for album of the year in 2024, earning Morgane her first ACM award as an official co-producer. Since we saw him that night at the Ryman in 2017 his career has skyrocketed. There isn’t anyone out there who doesn’t seem to love his music, his lyrics or him.

“I’m grateful.” He looks at me over his arms that are still draped over his guitar. “I’m grateful I get to do this. I’m grateful for what it brings my family and that’s all that matters at the end of the day — those five people who call you daddy.”

It’s something we’ve talked about before, but the longer we sit there it’s obvious that words can’t describe the depth of what he feels, or even what he knows. I get it because I have the same push/pull with my profession, so we stammer through the personal stuff. That’s the whole point, I’m realizing, sharing that struggle with someone you trust, and this is that time and place. We never land anywhere with it, but, rather, travel in it, witnessed.

“Let’s go eat!” Morgane says. “What do you want?”

Suggestions: Mexican, chicken or burgers? “S–t, you’re from California. We can’t take you for tacos. Y’all have your Mexican food covered.” We land on Hattie B’s, a staple hot chicken joint in town known for its added spicy sauce.

We hop in the car, the four of us, the AV crew, Poncho and whoever else wants to come, with Morgane driving. She got a new car, a mom car. We pull into the small parking lot and there’s one spot. “Ain’t no way you’re going to make that,” Chris challenges. “Watch me,” Morgane retorts. She seven-point turns until she slips right into the space like a hand into a baseball glove. “Damn, woman!”

We get a table outside.

“What’d you get, medium?” I ask Chris, curious if he is one of those burn-until-you-have-to-call-911 eaters.

“No, mild. I don’t mess with that medium stuff. It’s not real medium anyway. Somebody’s temperature gauge must have broke.”

“What about the hot?”

“There’s mild, medium, hot, ‘damn hot’ and ‘shut the cluck up!’ I stick with mild.”

“Want to try the hot with me?” Morgane asks.

“Yeah,” I excitedly and blindly reply.

They bring us some hot, along with some quarter and half birds, fried pickles, a few orders of “dirty bird” fries, a black-eyed pea salad and a few banana puddings. Morgane hands me my drum stick with the hot goop on it and we each take a bite. It’s not bad.

Right at that moment we hear Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” from across the street. We all look over and see a man on a fully dressed, cream-white Harley-Davidson ­unapologetically karaoke-ing to the blasting coming from his motorcycle speakers: “Then I look at you/And the world’s all right with me/Just one look at you/And I know it’s going to be/A lovely day…”

We are all smiling. The man on the motorcycle is stopped and looking up at the sun, also smiling.

And my mouth is getting hotter.

“Look at him! How great, man. Does anybody have water?” I start to panic, but everyone is focused on the Bill Withers guy on a motorcycle, so I don’t start screaming.

Morgane starts laughing, “This is f–king hot. My lips.”

Chris’s face is in the direct sun, and I know he’s getting sunburned, but he’s too polite to say anything. My lips are burning, and this is exactly what I want to be doing with my day: extraordinary people doing ordinary s–t.

The man with the motorcycle drives away, taking the song but not the feeling away with him.

We finish our banana puddings, and Morgane and I each wipe our now blistering lips.

“Let’s get outta here,” somebody says, though I don’t know who.

The plan when we got back was to continue the interview, but that moment has passed. We’ve talked. We’ve jammed. Kathryn needs to take her photos so she and Chris go somewhere that she feels will inspire, and Morgane and I are left to reminisce on what today has been.

“I wanted you guys to go back to the roots thing,” she says, looking at me like a mother taking care of her boy. “The drive your book [Brolin’s memoir, From Under the Truck] came from was from your mother and his was from his father. That’s the connection between you guys — you trying to please your mother and him his father.

“After SteelDrivers [the bluegrass band that Chris started and was subsequently fired from] he went solo on a heavy riff, sex rock’n’roll-type music,” she continues. “A departure. And he had a lot of fun doing it, but it didn’t hit. This was before the Traveller album. So we were sitting on the couch one night talking about what we were going to do. And I’ll never forget it: He looked at me and said he needed to do something with meaning.”

I hear Kathryn and Chris laughing from across the room.

“He had already written all the songs. Brian Wright and him. You know, a close-knit team. And he said, ‘I would like to make a record that would make my dad proud.’ And that’s the root. I think he’s been chasing that ever since.”

“When did his dad die?”
“2013.”
“Before Traveller.”
“Yep.”

We were supposed to leave, get back to our respective kids, but we ended up at the table on the disco floor, just shooting the s–t: me, Kathryn, Chris, Morgane and Poncho. Poncho used to work at the used car dealership in town. He knows a lot about guitars too. Chris, Morgane and him met and they hit it off. He takes care of the warehouse now. He’s family. It’s obvious how deep the mutual care is. He lost a son. His wife then said he needed to leave because it wasn’t good for their daughter, his drinking and staying out so late every night. He couldn’t imagine life without his son. Then God came into the fold. Saved him from himself. Reminded him that there were others that needed taking care of. He got his s–t together and showed up, and today they are all together, slogging through the moments, as a family.

I have tears in my eyes (even as I write this) thinking of that late-night talk at the table on the disco floor, Chris easy with whatever wanted to happen. All the talks that day, but this one, especially.

Yes, Chris and Morgane Stapleton are country rock stars; there’s no refuting that. But when it comes down to it, they’re all about finding meaning in the music and in the moments — with their fans, their families and between each other.

We spent the day together just shooting the s–t, eating hot wings, singing along with Miranda Lambert and Bill Withers and, yeah, it’s true, I got to play the drums with Chris f–king Stapleton.

Amen to it all.

This story appears in the May 31, 2025, issue of Billboard.