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Chris Stapleton kicked off the weekend with anticipation for his next chapter of music. The award-winning country megastar released “White Horse” on Friday (July 21), a soulful anthem appearing on his forthcoming record. Stapleton announced that his new album, Higher, is set to release on November 10. See the track list here:
- What Am I Gonna Do
- South Dakota
- Trust
- It Takes A Woman
- The Fire
- Think I’m In Love With You
- Loving You On My Mind
- White Horse
- Higher
- The Bottom
- The Day I Die
- Crosswind
- Weight Of Your World
- Mountains of My Mind
“’Higher’ is a song that’s been around a long, long time,” Stapleton said of the title track, per his record label. “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 said his wife, Morgane Stapleton, is always the first person to hear any of his songs, including “White Horse.” Stapleton remembered his wife thought it was “not the most romantic thing in the world,” though he continued to bring it up and, after recording it in the studio, “I think she might’ve changed her mind on it.”
“’White Horse’ was a song that I wrote with my friend, Dan Wilson,” Stapleton said via his 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, and 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, and that’s kind of where the song came from and we kind of built it around a guitar riff, really.”
With his next project, Stapleton, who appeared on The Bobby Bones Show on Friday morning, follows his latest full-length album that released in 2020. That 14-track collection included its title track, “Cold,” “You Should Probably Leave” and other album highlights adding to a growing list of career-spanning hits. The Kentucky-born country artist is also known for singles like “Broken Halos,” “Tennessee Whiskey,” “Parachute,” “Millionaire,” “Nobody to Blame,” and more. Most recently, Stapleton released his powerful rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner (Live from Super Bowl LVII)” just before the Fourth of July, and collaborated with other country singer-songwriters including Carly Pearce (“We Don’t Fight Anymore”) and Alana Springsteen (“ghost in my guitar”).