Listen closely to “Maggie’s Song,” the eighth track on Chris Stapleton’s 2020 album Starting Over, and you are hearing a man who could barely get through it. Stapleton was crying when he sang it. A few of the words came out so unclear that they had to be replaced after the fact, which goes against the way he has made every record of his career.
A singer who keeps the first true take
Stapleton and his longtime producer, Dave Cobb, are known for capturing performances live in the room. His breakthrough album Traveller was recorded in a week and mixed the next. The idea is simple: what happens in front of the microphone is what the listener gets.
“Maggie’s Song” broke that rule, though only by a few words. Talking with Noel King on NPR’s Morning Edition the week the album came out, he explained that replacing a word is not something they normally do, but a handful of words on this song could not be made out at all.
I’m crying on the recording of that.
He added that he was not sure listeners could actually hear it. He described himself as being in a real spot emotionally every time he came to that song.
The puppy in the shopping cart
Maggie came into the Stapletons’ lives by accident. Chris and his wife, Morgane, found her as a small, fuzzy black puppy left in a shopping cart in a PetSmart parking lot. Somebody had abandoned her. They put her in the car and took her home.
She stayed for 14 years. She was there as the couple’s family grew to five children, and she moved with them when they left town for a ranch outside Franklin, Tennessee, where she spent her later years chasing squirrels and keeping an eye on the kids. She was a lab-terrier mix, and Stapleton has been honest that he never thought of himself as a dog person. He made an exception for her.
Speaking to the Tennessean, he put it plainly.
She was a member of the family, and she deserved a song.
A rainy Monday in 2019
Maggie died in 2019. On her last morning, a rainy Monday, she woke up and could no longer use her legs. Chris lay down on the floor next to her. She rested her head in his hand the way she had done for years, and he told her goodbye.
The next day he sat down and wrote about it. Stapleton has said songs often come to him in 10 or 15 minutes, and this one was no different. He told the Los Angeles Times that every detail in it is true and nothing was embellished. He told NPR the same thing: every word of the song is a true thing.
Ten minutes to write, much harder to sing
Writing it was fast. Singing it was not. The song was cut during the Starting Over sessions at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A, and Stapleton has admitted it was one of the toughest on the album to get through.
That one was hard to sing.
He told the Los Angeles Times he kept crying through a lot of the take. On the finished record, Benmont Tench plays piano, Cobb plays acoustic guitar, and Morgane sings harmony behind her husband, the same woman who had stood with him in that parking lot years earlier.
Why a private song made the album
The album itself had a rough start. Stapleton and his band first went to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama looking for a spark, and the power went out across the entire town. He took it as a sign to stop, write more and live more. They set the album aside for most of 2019 and finished it in late February 2020, days before the pandemic shut everything down.
That year away changed what went on the record. Stapleton told NPR that many songs he writes are just a way to cope, meant only for the moment they come out, and never released. With the extra time, he and his team decided some of those songs belonged on this album. “Maggie’s Song” was one of them, crying and all.
Singing it on national television
On April 18, 2021, Stapleton performed “Maggie’s Song” on the ACM Awards broadcast from the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. Morgane could not be there; she was on baby watch for a family birth that night. Miranda Lambert, whose MuttNation foundation rescues dogs, stepped in to sing the harmony.
That same night, Starting Over won Album of the Year.