Classic country songs about growing up12/18/2023 If you want a cowboy on a white horse Riding off into the sunset If that’s the kinda love you wanna wait for Hold on tight, girl, I ain’t there yet “Feels like it’s a loaded gun.” Though Stapleton can be convincingly tender and steadfast, things are more fun when he sounds like a bucking bronco: “This love is getting kinda dangerous,” Stapleton roars during the first verse, following a raunchy electric-guitar lick. “White Horse,” one of the album’s brawnier tunes, is about the panic and shame that arise when a person realizes he might not be ready to shoulder someone else’s devotion. The fraught love songs on “Higher” might not be obviously autobiographical, but Stapleton still embodies desire and devastation with impressive gusto. Morgane often sings harmonies for Stapleton (she is credited as a producer and writer on “Higher”), and when the two perform together they tend to meet and hold each other’s gaze-the intensity of these moments is reminiscent of what passed between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in the final minute of their famed 1997 performance of “Silver Springs,” only happier, sweeter, less feral. Stapleton has been married to the singer and songwriter Morgane Stapleton for sixteen years they have five children. Loving someone, accepting someone’s love, that’s it. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering if the human experience might be about more than just nurturing and then sustaining an intense romantic connection with another person, Stapleton’s here to say that he is sorry, he really is, but that’s what matters. Thematically, the album is concerned almost exclusively with affairs of the heart. The feel on “Higher,” his fifth solo album, is less Lothario and more lonesome cowboy, brooding under the stars. He has the sort of muscular, room-shaking voice that carries emotion well, but it is nevertheless gritty enough to avoid sentimentality. Stapleton, who is forty-five, is an understated, bluesy guitarist. Or, as he puts it in another new song, “When there’s a day I can live without you, baby, it’ll be the day I die.” When you’re in the business of singing burly, sorrowful tunes about the capriciousness of relationships, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. The fact that a broken heart can mend is insulting to the grandeur and the spectacle of love. “What am I gonna drink / When I don’t have to think / About what I’m gonna do without you?” Stapleton worries. The song, which was written with Miranda Lambert, frets over what happens when the trembling and the yearning and the fear finally give way to more mundane emotions-ambivalence or, worse, acceptance. “What am I gonna do when I get over you?” the singer Chris Stapleton asks on “What Am I Gonna Do,” the opening track of his new album, “Higher.” Stapleton, like every big-voiced country singer worth his Stetson, recognizes that few feelings are richer-more generative, more vivid, more flush-than fresh heartache.
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