Either Way

"Either Way" is the bleakest thing Stapleton has recorded, and it earns that with almost nothing: a single electric guitar, faint organ shading, no drums, no bass to speak of. The silence between phrases is a real instrument here. He wrote it years earlier for the Nashville songwriting mill, and Lee Ann Womack cut it first, but Stapleton's version strips it further until it's just a man in a room stating facts. The emotional landscape is a marriage that has already died and hasn't been buried — separate rooms, painted-on smiles for company, a wife who may leave or stay while he insists he'll be fine either way. That refrain is the lie the whole song rests on; his voice betrays it every time, swelling on the last chorus into something close to a wail before pulling back. The vocal control is extraordinary precisely because it's used to withhold. In country tradition this belongs beside George Jones's ruined-love ballads rather than anything contemporary, and it deliberately rejects the redemptive turn radio expects. Listen to it alone, without doing anything else — it doesn't survive being background music, and it is the wrong song to play if you're currently in an argument you haven't finished.