What Are You Listening To?
Chris Stapleton’s third studio album, From A Room: Volume 2, will be released on December 1. Here’s why you need to tune in.
When Chris Stapleton’s debut album, Traveller, came out in 2015, I was chained to a desk job, slinging content for a marketing agency in downtown Boston. The job was a repetitive, task-heavy slog where the monotony was broken up by the office gossip of overly-hormonal 20-somethings, and good tunes. When the shrill voices of coworkers got to be too much, I often retreated into my headphones seeking the reprieve of something that would drown out the constant influx of client requests.
Luckily, I had some friends who worked in the cubes next door who had similar tendencies and would send recommendations back and forth with me. That’s how I found Stapleton. He was passed to me like a dish at family dinner — equally filling, familiar, and made with love.
For the past two years, various songs off of Traveller, and a few covers he did on YouTube, have become engrained in the soundtrack of my life. Work days during the tail end of my tenure at that agency job were punctuated with “Might as Well Get Stoned.” When I fall into the spiral of overthinking things — as one is wont to do in their 20s — nothing can pull me out quite like “When the Stars Come Out.” And no song has found it’s way into my life at such a perfect time as his version of “Your Man.”
Then in May of this year, on the two year anniversary of the release of his debut album, he released From a Room: Volume 1.
It’s a crooning, devastating, heavy-hearted album that let’s Stapleton show his vocal prowess in nine stripped-down, no-frills tracks. If you didn’t know how much he loved his wife, Morgane, you would think that it reads like the book of a very personal failed marriage. Instead, you find yourself listening, shocked and enthralled, by his ability to milk every ounce of feeling out of notes that he makes otherworldly. If the three-song run of “Either way” — a masterfully done Lee Ann Womack cover, — “I Was Wrong”, and “Without Your Love” doesn’t absolutely ruin you, you’re a robot.
That album, Volume 1, was a gut-wrenching tale of love gone wrong, but it felt like only half of the story.
Last Thursday, while so many of us were gathered around family tables filling our bellies and giving thanks for our plenties, National Public Radio (NPR) gave us a little extra to be thankful for by teasing Volume 2 — the full album, which will be officially released on Friday — in an online review.
The album opens with the first single, “Millionaire,” which juxtaposes all the heartache from Volume 1 by keeping the simplicity of affairs of the heart at it’s core.
They say “Love is more precious than gold”
Can’t be bought and it can’t be sold
I got love enough to spare
That makes me a millionaire
From there, we travel through “Hard Living” — a romp that let’s Stapleton have a little southern bar-brawl fun that calls Road House imagery to mind. The middle of the album holds “Nobody’s Lonely Tonight” and “Trying to Untangle My Mind”, both of which present themes that seem far too relatable.
But, like with Volume 1, my personal favorite song on the album is a cover. The last track is a cover of Pop Staples’ “Friendship.” Which, if you’ve never heard the original, just throw that on right now.
Stapleton makes it entirely his own. He weaves his gravely, down-home vocals with the smooth, honey-soaked sounds of his backing guitar. The lyrics are a heartfelt ode to those people who aren’t ours by blood, but by choice. The impact of which is emphasized by Morgane singing harmonies on two words throughout: “Friendship” and “lifetime.”
For the past six months, fans of the Stapletons have been left with this hollow feeling from the bone-deep sadness of Volume 1. It’s just been hanging in the air like an unanswered call.
With Volume 2, we finally get what we’ve been waiting for: a response.
It’s layered. It’s hopeful. It’s complicated. It’s full of love.
It’s life in stereo. Go turn it up.
