It's always easy to get wrapped up in the numbers. You always want to know whether or not what you're doing is truly impacting people or not. However, it can also cause you to be overly calloused or cynical, swearing nothing matters. The more you wrap yourself in the chart performance, the creation becomes disingenuous after a while. The creation ends up solely for the sake of reaching a quota. For someone like Chris Stapleton, he finds just as much joy in his lesser known songs as his titanic hits.
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Recently, Stapleton spoke with Dale Earnhardt Jr. on his Dale Jr. Download podcast. There, he zooms out and looks at his career and the various accomplishments he's achieved. Particularly, Chris tackles radio success and Dale asks if that's something he concerns himself with on a day to day. Ultimately, for the sake of his sanity, he avoids fixating on it. "Well, I have done that before, but I don't. As a songwriter, there's these services where you can watch realtime where these things are going... that will drive you crazy. It's not worth it," Stapleton says.
"I had learned not to by that point... why? Well the reason is because somebody will tell you if it does good, and somebody will tell you if it's gone. So there's no real reason to watch it, you just go do the next thing," Chris adds.
Chris Stapleton Avoids Looking at The Numbers in His Music
Dale, on the other hand, loves the tracking the Billboard charts to see what's truly resonating with people. But Stapleton emphasizes that as long as you're visible and tangible with the audience, everything else falls into place. "I'm not saying it's not important in any way shape or form... I mean, streams are a different thing. all those things are important in ways that they've always been important: they are visibility," Chris says. "But it doesn't change how I make something. I'm just as proud of something that died in the 40s as I am of something that went all the way to #1 because I believed in it."
