“What am I gonna do when I get over you?” the singer Chris Stapleton asks on “What Am I Gonna Do,” the opening track of his new album, “Higher.” Stapleton, like every big-voiced country singer worth his Stetson, recognizes that few feelings are richer—more generative, more vivid, more flush—than fresh heartache. The song, which was written with Miranda Lambert, frets over what happens when the trembling and the yearning and the fear finally give way to more mundane emotions—ambivalence or, worse, acceptance. “What am I gonna drink/When I don’t have to think/About what I’m gonna do without you?” Stapleton worries. The fact that a broken heart can mend is insulting to the grandeur and the spectacle of love. When you’re in the business of singing burly, sorrowful tunes about the capriciousness of relationships, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Or, as he puts it in another new song, “When there’s a day I can live without you, baby, it’ll be the day I die.”
Denne historien er fra November 27, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra November 27, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.