Tell My Mama That I did My Best

Death Row by Chris Stapleton is a bleak old-school country ballad of acceptance and defeat centered on a heartbreaking and soulful vocal performance backed by spare instrumentation and eerie ambiance.

Death Row is not a country song. It's a blues song. Stapleton wrote it as such and then sat on it for ten years. Thankfully, he eventually recorded Death Row and released it as the last track on his hotly anticipated (in 2017) sophomore album, "Songs from a Room: Volume 1."

Death Row has vibes to spare. The track starts with a bandsaw or some other sort of dangerous machinery operating in the distance. It continues throughout, providing an ominous industrial punctuation for a straight-down-the-middle, by-the-numbers, blues diddy. But the production is anything but.

The lead vocal performance is alone in the center of the mix, with just a hint of reverb. Perhaps it's sung by a person rotting in a prison cell with gravel in their gut and spit in their eye.

Blues guitar stabs at the edges of the song. It ducks and feints around the mix, alternately gaining steam and losing motivation at the edges of the mix over a rhythm section that seems to be plodding through the prison yard after a hard rain. The dynamic range is wide and the soundstage is vast on this slow jam heartbreaker. 

As is proper for all the best-recorded songs, the floor and the ceiling are high. Death Row sounds good on most stereos and otherworldly when played on some real hi-fi. As for the road, it is lonely, and the outlook is dire for our entombed protagonist waiting for "the call." 

Is the call from the governor or the executioner? I suspect it's the latter. And sometimes, that's just what I need: something blue. Stapleton and Co. deliver something fierce on this track with a soul the color of midnight.

Data

Song: Death Row
Album: Songs from a Room: Volume 1
Artist: Chris Stapleton
Genre: Country
Year: 2017
Length: 4:03
Composer: Chris Stapleton, Mike Henderson
Producer: Chris Stapleton, Dave Cobb