There is a voice on this record that sounds like it was already old when Chris Stapleton was born.
Traveller arrived in May 2015 with almost no warning and promptly rearranged what a lot of people thought was possible from a Nashville studio album. Stapleton had spent the previous decade and a half writing songs for other people — “Never Wanted Nothing More” for Kenny Rogers, “Either Way” for a long drawer somewhere before he eventually cut it himself — and the craft shows everywhere on this record. These aren’t the songs of a man who stumbled into a good melody. Every line has been turned over.
The Room It Was Made In
The album was recorded at RCA Studio A in Nashville, one of those rooms where the ghosts actually outnumber the microphones. Chet Atkins recorded there. Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Elvis — the list becomes embarrassing. Producer Dave Cobb, who had recently finished Jason Isbell’s Something More Than Free, understood exactly what the room wanted to give and mostly stayed out of its way.
Cobb’s instinct here was to track live and keep the leakage. You can hear it — the way Stapleton’s vocal bleeds into the guitar mic, the way the whole thing breathes together rather than being assembled in pieces. The band was kept small on purpose.
J.T. Cure handled bass. Drummer Derek Mixon plays with a looseness that Nashville session work usually beats out of people by the second year. Stapleton’s wife Morgane sings harmonies throughout, and her voice against his is one of those combinations that makes you wonder how you ever listened to either of them alone.
That Voice
Let’s be direct about it: Stapleton’s voice is not a normal human voice. It has the size of early Rod Stewart and the grain of Gregg Allman and something underneath neither of them had — a kind of weight that doesn’t feel performed.
“Tennessee Whiskey” is the song that got him on television, the one Jimmy Fallon played three times in a month, but it’s not the reason to sit with this record. The reason is “Sometimes I Cry,” which is just Stapleton and a lyric so honest it’s almost uncomfortable to be in the room for.
Or “Might As Well Get Stoned,” which is funny and sad in the way that only country music does well when it’s actually trying.
Or the title track, which closes the record and runs nearly seven minutes and never overstays its welcome for a single one of them.
What Cobb Left In
Dave Cobb has said that his job is mostly to capture what’s already there, and you believe him when you hear this. The production has almost nothing on it — no processing on the vocal that you’d notice, no EQ shimmer, no modern sheen. The snare sounds like a snare in a room.
RCA Studio A was also where Cobb would later record Sturgill Simpson’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, and you can hear the same philosophy at work: big room, live band, no fixing what doesn’t need fixing.
The mastering landed on the warm side of loud, which is the right call. This is not an album for your laptop speakers.
Traveller won the Grammy for Best Country Album and Best Country Solo Performance and Album of the Year in the same night — a sweep that surprised people who hadn’t been paying attention to Stapleton for fifteen years. The people who had been were not surprised at all.