Chris Stapleton has earned his fourth No. 1 hit with “White Horse,” the lead single off his latest album, Higher.

Stapleton co-wrote White Horse along with Dan Wilson in 2012, hoping it would make it onto the soundtrack of 2013’s The Lone Ranger starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer. In a press release, Stapleton explained the origin of the song. “We were out in Los Angeles, it was about I think probably late 2012, early 2013, and there was a movie called The Lone Ranger that was coming out. I walked in the room to write with Dan at his house and he said, ‘Hey, they’re looking for songs for this Lone Ranger movie.’ I said, ‘Cool. Let’s write something. What do you know about it?’”  Wilson didn’t know anything about the movie, so the pair sat down to write something that sounded like it belonged in a Western film.  Said Stapleton: “That’s kind of where that came from, and we got to talking about how it would be cool to have a kind of rock-driven western-themed song. We kind of built it around a guitar riff.”

While the song didn’t make it onto the movie soundtrack. it joined other songs in Stapleton’s vault, who then included it on his 2023 album Higher. Stapleton released the song last July as the lead single from the album.

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