Chris Stapleton is going into Sunday night’s ACM Awards already a winner. He picked up the award for New Male Vocalist of the Year. He’s also up for numerous other awards, including Male Vocalist, Album of the Year for Traveller, Song of the Year for “Nobody to Blame” (as both artist and songwriter) and Vocal Event of the Year for “Hangover Tonight” with Gary Allan.

He’s experienced such a huge wave of success over the past year – heck, the past six months – with three CMA Awards, a huge CMA performance with Justin Timberlake, and through it all, he trusted his instincts where his music is concerned.

“I always just listen to myself, hopefully to a fault. And sometimes if I ever catch myself not listening to what I want to do musically or personally or anything, it always puts me in a bad spot,” says Chris. “So, hopefully, I’ve learned to follow my own instinct of what I need to do or want to do. It always just kind of works out for me musically and as a job path.”

“The best example I can give [is] I was in a band called The Steel Drivers. Choosing a career in bluegrass isn’t exactly like, it doesn’t sound like job security to most people, but I was in that band for a few years and out of that, those recordings and those records that I made with that band, a song was recorded by Adele. That’s not a path that you would take to get a song recorded by Adele. No one would ever tell you to be in a bluegrass band, [with] a country rhythm, make a few records with them and you’ll get a cut by the biggest pop star in the world. Those are things that just happen I think when you (A) get really, really lucky and (B) try to follow your path, and whatever that path may be. Sometimes you just don’t know why you have to do those things, and if you listen to yourself enough, you just go do it and figure out what it’s for later.”

Chris is set to perform on the 51st Academy of Country Music Awards, which will air live from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas April 3rd at 8pm ET/PT delayed on CBS.