Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for ACM

Songwriters can often be inspired to write a hit by something as little as a line from a movie or book, but Chris Stapleton and his “White Horse” co-writer, Dan Wilson, had even less than that.

“’White Horse’ was a song that I wrote with my friend, Dan Wilson. 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, and 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?’ He goes, ‘Well, we don’t really know anything.’ I was like, ‘Well, let’s just make a song that might sound like that.'”

“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, and that’s kind of where the song came from and we kind of built it around a guitar riff, really.”