Chris Stapleton Wrote This Career-Changing Song for Thomas Rhett

Thomas Rhett‘s “Crash and Burn” represented a major shift in direction when he released it in 2015, due to its pop, soul and R&B influences.

Those influences might be even more surprising to some fans, given the fact that a pre-fame Chris Stapleton was one of the writers on the song.

How Did Chris Stapleton Become Involved in Thomas Rhett’s “Crash and Burn”?

“Crash and Burn” came about more or less by a random fluke, Stapleton told Taste of Country in 2015.

“I have a good friend from Detroit named Jesse Frasure. We’re kind of a musical odd couple,” he said. “He’s a DJ and makes tracks. Stick us side by side, it’s kind of a funny-looking pairing. But we’re dear friends, and we’ve known each other a long time. He’s a wonderful guy, and a wonderful talent.”

Though their musical approaches are very different, the pair began working together — but not particularly with an eye toward releasing the results.

“Maybe two years I had some of these ideas for these kind of pop songs,” Stapleton recalled.

“He and I just started moonlighting — he’s a publisher in town, and he’s a popular songwriter now. He and I would get together at night, almost in secret, to make these tracks, these pop things with no real agenda. ‘Crash and Burn’ was one of the earlier efforts at that. He has kind of a modern Motown thing that he does, and mix that with a little bit of hillbilly that I do, and the result is songs like ‘Crash and Burn.'”

The track juxtaposed a fun, up-tempo vibe with a heartbreak lyric: “Do you hear that / It’s where I’m at / It’s the sound of teardrops fallin’ down, down / Slammin’ door and a lesson learned / I let another love crash and burn.”

“Crash and Burn” was a sharp turn in a very different direction for Rhett, who released the song as the lead single from his sophomore album, Tangled Up. The result was a song that stood out at country radio, and it actually marked a major turning point in his career, opening up his music to a wider range of influences while scoring a huge hit.

“He has a vision of where he wants to go and who he wants to be, I think, and a lot of these kinda different little pop things, guilty pleasures that Jesse and I made wound up in the hands of different artists and on buses, probably because they seemed musically odd to people to hear me do those things!” Stapleton said with a laugh.

“But it just wound up in his hands, and at some point TR looked at me and said, ‘Hey man, can I have this song?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, man, if you wanna cut it, do it.'”

Are Chris Stapleton and Thomas Rhett Friends?

It was particularly gratifying for Stapleton to see such an unusual song of his end up moving the ball forward for someone he’d known for a long time.

“I’ve known TR since before he was having the success he was having now, when he was just barely an adult,” he said with another laugh. “He’s a wonderful young man, and I’m happy for all his success, and happy to have any hand in it that if he wants to record some music.”

How Did “Crash and Burn” Change Thomas Rhett’ Career?

Talking to Taste of Country Nights a decade later, Rhett acknowledged that a lot of people on his team in 2015 advised him that releasing “Crash and Burn” could spell doom for his growing career — including his father, ’90s country star Rhett Akins, who’s now one of the most prominent songwriters in Nashville.

“I think ‘Crash and Burn’ might have been the first one that my dad was like, ‘I just think that’s not a good idea,'” Rhett related during a 2025 appearance.

“There was a lot of people that I trusted a lot that told me that was a terrible idea,” he added.

His decision to ignore them and trust his own instincts paid off when “Crash and Burn” reached the top of the charts, giving Rhett his fourth career No. 1 song.

“That song did something really big for me. I think it kind of separated me from a lot of folks,” Rhett noted. “But there were a lot of people that were like, ‘Hey, this could be career destruction for you.'”

Rhett released “Crash and Burn” in April of 2015. Stapleton released his debut solo album, Traveller, that May, and the album’s overwhelming success took Stapleton from a prominent singer-songwriter in the Nashville community to one of the biggest country stars of his generation.