Chris Stapleton’s 2015 album Traveller continues to explore new heights. A decade after its release, Billboard has announced that Traveller is number one on their Top Country Albums of the 21st Century chart. The ranking is based on record performance on the weekly Top Country Albums chart from the start of 2000 through the end of 2024. Other albums ranking within the top 10 include Taylor Swift’s Fearless and Sam Hunt’s Montavello.
Since its release in May 2015, Traveller has spent a whopping 525 weeks on their Top Country Albums chart. The only other album to reach the 500 week milestone in the chart’s history is Willie Nelson’s 1978 record Stardust.
On top of its success on country charts, Traveller also spent two weeks atop the Billboard 200 after the 2015 Country Music Association Awards, where Stapleton performed a duet of the now mega-hit “Tennessee Whiskey” with Justin Timberlake. Traveller was named Album of the Year at the same award ceremony.
The record was additionally nominated for Album of the Year at the 58th Grammy Awards, where it won Best Country Album. Stapleton also took home the Grammy for Best Country Solo Performance that night for the album’s title track.
The album was a success with critics too; Rolling Stone praised upon its release that the record “encapsulates everything that makes [Stapleton] one of the most powerful and unique voices in country music today: gravelly, soulful and full of songs that ring like instant classics without ever resting too deeply in the past.”
The genesis for the album’s creation was a major transformation in Stapleton’s life. As he told Billboard: “I lost my dad in October 2013 and did a little bit of soul-searching. My wife was kind enough to buy me an old Jeep. We flew out to Phoenix and drove it all the way back to Nashville through the desert. I thought a lot about music and my dad, and the things that he would have liked that I should be doing. Out of that, I actually wrote the song ‘Traveller’ driving down Interstate 40 through New Mexico. That became the cornerstone for the record and wound up being the title track.”
Buy Chris Stapleton’s Traveller on vinyl now.
