Don’t expect to see the great Chris Stapleton on the 50-yard line this February… or any other time for that matter. With Super Bowl LX right around corner, fans are already wondering about the customary national anthem performance, and gamblers in particular, are wondering how long it’s going to run. Charlie Puth is slated to handle the Star Spangled Banner this year, but as talented as the man is, he’s certainly no Chris Stapleton. He’s not Whitney Houston either…

Chris Stapleton’s 2023 masterpiece, a rendition so soul-stirring that it brought Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni to tears, among others, remains the most-watched anthem of the decade. The performance left everyone wondering why the the 10-time GRAMMY winner doesn’t sing it every year, but Chris revealed that he’s hanging up the “Banner” for good. And honestly, I don’t blame him. I think there’s more pressure on the person singing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl than the halftime performance… those are so subjective, and how much you like it probably depends purely on how much you like the artist performing.

Of course, Bad Bunny is set to perform this year… in a dress apparently… so you already know it’s going to get torn to shreds by good chunk of the American population. The Donald Trump-hating California rock band, Green Day, is also set to perform the pre-show, so in this hyper-divisive political climate, it certainly sounds like the NFL is trying to send a message. We’ll save that conversation for another blog…

But the anthem is a completely different thing, and a hard enough song to sing as it is… so when it comes to the biggest sporting event of the year, with millions of eyes on one person singing one of America’s most sacred songs, it’s just so hard to pull off. If you nail it, you did your job, and if you mess it up… you’re the biggest failure in all of music and you’ll never live it down. Eric Church performed the Super Bowl anthem a few years back after avoiding it for his entire career… he even said “Honestly, there’s just more to lose than to gain.” And he’s right… that’s absolutely what the stakes are.

Chris Stapleton “Retires”

Chris has said before that he used to joke about singing the anthem at the Super Bowl, and now that he’s done it and nailed it, he told Dale Earnhardt Jr. on an episode of his Dirty Mo Media podcast recently that he’s officially retired from doing it ever again, and he even credited the editing for making the performance even better:

“Oh yeah, I practiced that one. I don’t get nervous to play, necessarily… that one, I was like I’m gonna make sure I’m as prepared as I can be for this. I would have people ask me to sing the National Anthem for various things, and I jokingly always said, ‘No, I’ll just do it when it’s time to do it at the Super Bowl,’ you know.

And I just turned it down a lot, and I do say now that I’ve officially retired from it as well. And I have to give credit to, and I’m not saying my version wasn’t wasn’t good, I think it was good, but all the TV editing that they did while I was doing it was just spot on.

Everything that they did to make that moment feel as big and nice as it could, they did it. And they executed flawlessly. So, yes, I prepared for that and yes, I worked on that. Genuinely nerve-racking, and I was live live. There was no pre-record anything.”

Never once in my life have I ever thought Chris Stapleton has pre-recorded anything… he doesn’t need to. But I totally understand him being completely done with it. Ride out in a blaze of glory, as one of the two best ever performances and call it a career. You have nothing left to prove.

Dale Jr. also asked if he was able to build confidence throughout the song, once it started going well, but Chris confirmed that he was locked in from the beginning. It’s all about focus during the anthem… you’re not trying to crush as much as you are trying NOT to mess it up:

“I do have a thing in my personality that the more pressure there is like that, it makes me focus more and I think that I realize that I was doing something good in the moment. I don’t know, I realized I was not messing up. That was my goal, was to not mess up. Not mess up the words not flub a guitar lick or anything… that was my goal, was to get through it to a degree that, alright, I executed the national anthem without insulting the National Anthem.”

He said his team seemed happy with it, so he was content in knowing he didn’t blow it and could relax and watch the game:

“I think the people that were around me were real happy about it. Yeah, and so I was like, ‘Alright.’ And then I can drop my shoulders a little bit and go ‘Okay, I did the thing, let’s go watch the football game.’”

That might be an understatement… everyone LOVED it. Luke Combs was famously sitting next to Adele at the Super Bowl and he confirmed that she was going absolutely bonkers during the performance. Pink was utterly blown away, Travis Kelce was stunned… he even admits he’ll throw it on when he’s having a sad day, just to have a good cry.

It was the best ever… one and done, forever living in

The podcast clip: