BIG LOVE

Chris Stapleton's case for affairs of the heart.

- AMANDA PETRUSICH

“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.”