Chris Stapleton quotes:

I was in a bluegrass band. I made two records with a band called the SteelDrivers. They were nominated for two Grammys. I then I was in a rock band called the Junction Brothers; we made kind of '70s hard rock music.

In the kind of fast-food world that we live in, where everything's so fast paced and it's, 'Look over here! Look over there,' we don't really take the time to sit down and enjoy music - or anything else, for that matter.

I was born in Fayette County, over in Lexington, Kentucky, but I was raised most of my life in Paintsville.

I think the path is different for everybody. Go after the doors that are open to you. That has always been my motto getting into the music business. Do the things that seem to be good opportunities and work hard at it. Try to make good decisions and be nice. Hopefully all of that will pay off at some point.

I walked into a demo session one time, and a guy said, 'I'm thinking kind of like a Trace Adkins thing.' And I looked him right in the eye and said, 'Man, you've got the wrong guy. I'm gonna have to fire myself. You've got to hire somebody else.'

Country music is one of those places where we support each other and prop each other up.

You always hope for the best when you put something out and try to make the best music you can make, but you can't control what happens after that.

I grew up in eastern Kentucky, and we would sing in the churches, and there's lots of good mountain church singers out there. Like a lot of folks who turn out to be secular music artists, that's a lot of the training you put in, whether you know it or not.

We have a history in country music of writing about the darker side of things - maybe not as much in modern times, but there's a lot of cheating and self-deprecation. We sort it out in song, in country music, as a genre.

Lyrically, 'less words mean more' is a pretty good rule of thumb. Try to cut out the fat and get to the meat of what you're saying.

I was in a band called the SteelDrivers, and we just played hard in vans, hopping on airplanes, not knowing where you're at.

I always tell people, 'The music's free. I get paid to travel.'

I don't look at family and what I do for a living as separate things. They're all kind of one thing, and this is part of their life just like it's part of mine.

I like to put something on and want to listen to it again once I get done listening to it, not feel like I need an ear break.

I don't try to approach things any differently, songwriting-wise, regardless of what I'm doing. I try to write whatever the best thing is that I'm doing that day. If I'm working on a pop song, I'm working on a pop song to the best of my ability. If I'm working on a bluegrass song, it's the same thing. They're not really different parts of the brain.

I'm always trying to do as many different things as I can, just so when one is not doing so hot, maybe the other is still there.

The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

I'm not a hustler. I don't pitch songs. I don't ask people to write with me. It's not what I do.

I can only be me. I have a hard time being a chameleon as a singer.

I write the songs and hand it over to the world and see what happens. But the things that I've written for people that have been hits, I don't know that I would have directed them in the right path, but they definitely wound up on the right path.

I'm a fan of polarization. If you make something that is palatable to everybody, it's like making vanilla ice cream, and I think we have enough of that.

My dad was a very straight arrow, prayed-at-every-meal kind of guy.