Chris Stapleton Opens Up On Late Dog Maggie: “She Deserved A Tribute Of A Song”

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It’s pretty widely-accepted at this point that Chris Stapleton’s new album Starting Over is a masterpiece.

Between his scathing message to the Route 91 Harvest shooter with “Watch You Burn,” to his break up letter to the city of Nashville, every song is just as good as the last.

However, one of the immediate standouts for fans is the heart-wrenching “Maggie’s Song,” a tribute to his dog that Maggie that passed away after 14 years with Chris.

And for Chris, he wasn’t about to let her go without a tribute song. In fact, he wrote it the day after she passed:

“She deserved a tribute of a song. Now, whether or not I did her justice in the song, I don’t know, but she was a dog that deserved a song so I wrote a song about her the day after she died.

That song happened to carry through to me being allowed to play it live, and we wound up in the studio and we recorded it. And now it lives in the world to make people, um, more sad than they deserve to be (laughs) in a year that we don’t need much of that.

But I loved that dog very much, and she was a great member of our family.”

And in a recent interview with NPR, Chris confessed to crying on the recording of it:

“I’m crying on the recording of that. I don’t know if you can hear or not. There was a couple of words that had to replace, which is not normally something we would do. Usually we capture live performances, but there were a few words that were indiscernible. I’m definitely in a real spot on that song.”

Chris the puppy whisperer.

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