Chris Stapleton has a new single, out now, from his next album, due this fall The father of five just released “White Horse” as the first track from Higher, a 14-song project, scheduled to be released on November 10.
“’White Horse’ was a song that I wrote with my friend, Dan Wilson,” Stapleton tells his record label. “We were out in Los Angeles, it was about I think probably late 2012, early 2013, and there was a movie called The Lone Ranger that was coming out. I walked in the room to write with Dan at his house, and he said, ‘Hey, they’re looking for songs for this Lone Ranger movie.’ I said, ‘Cool. Let’s write something. What do you know about it?’ He goes, ‘Well, we don’t really know anything.’ I was like, ‘Well, let’s just make a song that might sound like that.’
“And so, that’s kind of where that came from, and we got to talking about how it would be cool to have a kind of rock-driven-western-themed song,” he continues. “That’s where the song came from, and we kind of built it around a guitar riff, really.”
“White Horse” is out now, but it’s the title track of Higher that served as the inspiration for the entire project, a song that has stood the test of time, and one that Stapleton has held on to for more than two decades.
“’Higher’ is a song that’s been around a long, long time,” Stapleton reveals. “I wrote it in 2001 within the first few months of being a professional songwriter here in Nashville, and it was on the first demo session I ever did in Nashville. So, for it to come around 22 years later and wind up being a title track of an album is a pretty unique thing to me.”
Stapleton will spend this weekend performing two back-to-back concerts in Nashville, as part of George Strait’s stadium tour.
“I love doing these shows with George about as much as I like doing anything,” Stapleton said of the tour. “There’s nothing to compare it to. So many of his songs are in the ethos of what country music is. Playing these shows together is a great experience all the way around.”
In addition to “White Horse,” Stapleton also joins Carly Pearce on her current single, “We Don’t Fight Anymore.” Find all of Stapleton’s music and upcoming shows, and pre-order Higher, at ChrisStapleton.com.