Chris Stapleton & Miranda Lambert’s “A Song to Sing”: Song Backstory

The bones of “A Song to Sing” were grounded in the supporting parts. In 2023, songwriter Jesse Frasure (“Park,” “Dirt on My Boots”) reached out to fiddler Jenee Fleenor, a five-time winner of the Country Music Association’s musician of the year award, about creating some musical beds that he could present during writing sessions.

“It’s actually something I’d always wanted to do,” she says, “but I didn’t know who to approach.”

They met a couple times and created 8-10 musical tracks in a variety of styles, with Fleenor playing riffs on her fiddle over chord progressions that Frasure supplied. One began with a major-seventh chord – used frequently in ‘70s pop songs – and Fleenor gave it an arching, nine-note melody in the intro and at the end of the prospective choruses.

It came to its full fruition during a writing appointment Lambert booked at Frasure’s studio in Nashville’s Crieve Hall neighborhood. They reached out to Stapleton on short notice, not knowing if he was even in town, and he agreed to meet them. Neither artist was at work on a specific album, so the crew had plenty of freedom to pursue whatever struck them.

“He pulled up, he was driving a Corvette — like a rust, ‘70s-looking, brown Corvette that day — so it was kind of fitting,” Frasure remembers. “We had wrote another song that probably sounds more like what you would expect Miranda and Chris to do, and then right before he was leaving, I just kind of played him that [‘70s-sounding track].”

Stapleton stayed. This track was too inspiring to quit, and they spent the next hour turning it into a full-fledged song. “There was certainly some mention of Dolly and Kenny vibes,” Stapleton says. “It had that vibe out of the gate.”

The opening major-seventh chord set the tone. Someone – no one remembers who, for certain – started a melody that played on its key feature, vacillating between the tonic note and the dissonant seventh (akin to alternating between “ti” and “do” in “Do-Re-Mi,” the Sound of Music song about musical scales). They came up with hazy lyrics that drew on the commitment required to maintain a relationship with their traveling lifestyles. The two singers traded lead parts, slipped in harmonies, and built to an ascendent chorus that compared romance to writing a song. “A Song to Sing” showed itself as the title, though it was positioned, unconventionally, in the middle of the chorus.

Instead of following that chorus with a second verse, Stapleton segued into a new, rising melody along with a lyric about overcoming “everything heavy on our shoulders.”

“We talked about it in the room,” Lambert recalls. “’Do we need a bridge? Do we not?’ And then just hearing Chris go, ‘And when this world…,’ it’s like, ‘Okay, we need a bridge if that’s what it’s going to sound like.’”

Lambert sat in a blue velvet chair and Stapleton stood in a corner as they dashed off vocals for the demo before they wrapped. Fleenor had picked up her engraved CMA award that same day and announced the debut EP for her bluegrass group Wood Box Heroes. She was stunned to receive a text from Frasure announcing that Lambert and Stapleton had just written a song based on their track.

“There was no second verse when they sent me the demo,” she says. “I dug it, but I remember Jesse and I having this conversation because the song was so short, and I think Jesse encouraged them to write a second verse.”

Frasure got Lambert and Stapleton back together a few weeks later to knock it out.

“I just wanted to hear that [opening] chord – maybe it’s the major seventh there – but I wanted to hear that first melody again,” Frasure says.

Sometime in 2024, Lambert and Stapleton went to Savannah, Ga., to record “A Song To Sing” with Stapleton’s band and producer Dave Cobb (Brandi Carlile, John Prine) in leisurely fashion at the Georgia Mae Studio.

“It’s on the intercoastal waterways, so it’s kind of like an escapism house that we started making records in,” Cobb says. “We just got out there and, Gilligan Island it, and stayed in kind of a little private setting on the water, which is really beautiful and calming.”

Bassist J.T. Cure and drummer Derek Mixon locked into a steady, deep groove. “J.T. has so much soul and feel,” Cobb says. “He’s kind of [like Motown’s] James Jamerson and all these great players, where he’s really making a bass part, and not just towing the line. He’s really individualistic with it. And Derek just has such a beautiful swagger and pocket. I think that’s what you hear with the combination of people, just turning off the math of it all, and just feeling the heart of it.”

They revised Fleenor’s fiddle riff as a combination of sounds – Lambert and Stapleton singing along with a guitar and keyboard, though no one can recall which parts they kept in the blend. Lambert felt vocally challenged by Stapleton, and dialed up an edgy, soulful quality.

“Singing with Chris, you have to be so powerful,” she says. “Country music just bleeds out of my pores. But this song, with the soul part of it, how the melody goes and how soulful Chris is, I was like, ‘All right, I gotta step up and really find some other places to go in my voice.’”

Lambert leaned on Morgane Stapleton as they developed some of the harmonies, and Frasure’s wife, Stevie Frasure, provided high harmonies in a separate session. The final step came when engineer Tom Elmhirst, affiliated with New York’s Electric Lady Studios, mixed it this year. “A Song To Sing” fit both artists’ single patterns, and following its July release, it’s at No. 33 on the Country Airplay chart dated Aug. 23, providing a joyful counterweight to a rancorous time in American life.

“There’s a lot of great things in the world, and I think if we concentrate on the things that are only heavy all the time, that’s all we’ll ever see,” Stapleton notes. “That’s what songs are for. It’s supposed to be one of those reminders that, ‘Hey, there are still good things, and we can enjoy those things.’ Even if they’re three minutes long.”