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Chris Stapleton’s ‘Most Personal’ Song on New Album Is About His Family Dog

On Friday, country star Chris Stapleton released his newest album “Starting Over,” and the artist calls the track “Maggie’s Song” the “most personal” song on the record.

The singer wrote “Maggie’s Song” as a tribute to his family’s late dog. Stapleton rescued Maggie and had her for 14 years before she passed away. Even though he said he doesn’t consider himself a dog person, that changed with Maggie who he loved deeply. Stapleton called his dog a member of his family who “deserved a song.”

“On this record, ‘Maggie’s Song’ is about my dog dying,” Stapleton explained to Vulture. “That’s probably one of the most personal things. Maggie was a family member of ours, so much so that in the moment, I felt like she deserved a song.”

The musician penned the song the day after her death, originally as a therapeutic way of dealing with the pain of losing his beloved dog. However, the song stuck with him, and he decided to record it. Stapleton said it’s a genuine song about a very real day in his life.

“I wrote that song in a therapeutic kind of way as a tribute, not necessarily trying to write for a record. Slowly, it stuck with me,” he continued. “I started playing it live a little bit. Then I said, ‘Let’s try to record it.’ That’s a very real day out of my life in that song.”

Chris Stapleton’s Fourth Album ‘Starting Over’ Releases

Chris Stapleton released a brand new, full-length album titled “Starting Over” on Friday. For the first time in three years, Stapleton shared an album full of new music with his fans.

The singer’s newest album took him and his band out of their comfort zone at RCA Studio A in Nashville. Stapleton has recorded all three of his previous albums in the famed Nashville studio. However, for the new record, he wanted to change things up. During the winter of 2018, Stapleton and his band booked Alabama’s iconic studio Muscle Shoals Sound to begin recording for the new album. Yet, things didn’t go to plan while attempting to create his fourth studio album.

“It was a different process for us,” Stapleton told The Tennessean. “The room’s very much a part of the band, to me, when you’re makin’ records. All these weird things were going down. The power shut down in all of Muscle Shoals while we were trying to record. There were all these weird stops. I’m a big ‘listen to the signs of the universe’ guy. We were in this what felt uncomfortable, to me, zone of tryin’ to make a record.”

The band stopped recording at Muscle Shoals Sound, went on tour, and held off on working on the new album until a year later. Finally, Stapleton returned to RCA’s Studio A during the winter of 2019. For his previous albums, recording sessions took a matter of days, but this time around it lasted years. For Stapleton’s fans, the wait will be worth it.

“This record has a lot of depth in it,” Stapleton said of “Starting Over.” “It has a lot of variance in tone and music. It feels a little bit like not a complete departure, but a little different lane to some of the things we’ve done. But it still very much sounds like the things that we do.”