Hear Chris Stapleton’s Searing New Song ‘Second One to Know’
Chris Stapleton fires twin barrels of country twang and blues rock bang with his new song “Second One to Know.” A highlight from next month’s From A Room: Volume 1, the song makes its premiere today, one week before the album’s official arrival.
“Second One to Know” is a roadhouse rocker, driven forward by electric guitars and shot through with Stapleton’s throaty, heartbroken howl. The singer wrote the song with former Steeldrivers bandmate Mike Henderson and recorded it at Dave Cobb’s RCA Studio A, using the same band that appeared on – and toured in support of – his career-making album Traveller. The result is something fresh and fierce, mixing the punch of a live band with the polish of Cobb’s reverb-friendly production.
From A Room hits stores exactly two years after 2015’s Traveller, which transformed Stapleton from a cult favorite into one of the genre’s leading men. Both of the intervening years were largely spent on the road, where Stapleton’s band ranged from a large lineup – including Willie Nelson’s harmonica player Mickey Raphael and Waylon Jennings’ pedal steel player Robby Turner – to a core group of four. Although he’ll remain on tour through Thanksgiving, Stapleton isn’t planning on waiting so long between releases again. He’ll release a companion album, From A Room: Volume 2, sometime later this year, as though to apologize for spending so much time on the road in the past.
Like its accompanying record, though, “Second One to Know” is worth the wait.