The dreariest, rainiest day at RodeoHouston this season (Thursday, March 16) cosmically coincided with Chris Stapleton's return to the neon cow and pony show. Maybe five songs in his growing discography match a sunny day, with the rest better suited for sepia-toned confrontations on prairies or a chilly kitchen table divorce request.

One of the biggest-selling country acts in recent history, Stapleton's pop culture seemingly knows no bounds of ubiquity. For the coming decades, generations will talk about hearing Stapleton throughout their lives. Sunday mornings spent fending for yourself in the kitchen for breakfast while Mom and Dad are blaring "Tennessee Whiskey" from the bedroom. The single mom in the school pick-up line wearing dark shades, playing "Broken Halos" until Spotify cries uncle. The emo cowpoke feeding the internet jukebox repeated plays of "Fire Away" at Buffalo Wild Wings at lunchtime. Making an NFL head coach projectile cry during his rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl.

Since his widescreen LP debut in 2015 with Traveller, Stapleton has done nearly everything in the industry besides winning a Tony or an Oscar. It wouldn't be surprising if somewhere under all that dirty blonde beard and Stetson is a Broadway show about a cattle rustler with a heart of fool's gold or a dirgy film score to end all film scores.

By the way, Traveller currently sits at No. 56 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, a mere eight years since the album's release. That kind of longevity is usually reserved for the likes of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (#133) and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (#29). His last album, 2020's Starting Over, is down at #79.

Photo courtesy of Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo

Stapleton's bluesy country melancholy matched the rainy Thursday night.

Consistently stunning in his songwriting and studio pairings, Stapleton is in his myth-making era, the soundtrack for heartbreaking or babymaking, splitting the difference between Waylon Jennings and Otis Redding.

He's long crossed that imaginary, arbitrary pop threshold that most country artists find themselves in and went and made songcraft appreciated again. He paved the way for the likes of Zach Bryan and Maggie Rogers to top charts with ragged hearts and found time to collaborate with Justin Timberlake and Joy Oladokun.

Stapleton's big-time intimacy suits RodeoHouston like a well-worn pair of ropers and for his fifth performance since debuting at NRG Stadium in 2017. Opening with "Parachute," Stapleton and his four-piece band – with the legendary Paul Franklin – turned the stadium into the world's most expensive backyard ice house.

He always seems to channel ZZ Top whenever he enters Harris County, and on Thursday night, he was finding ways to interweave Billy Gibbons licks into nearly every song. There was a wink in "Second One To Know," a spiritual callback in "Arkansas," and his beard is pretty ZZ as it gets.

Eight years since its album debut, "Nobody To Blame" is the sound of Stapleton in a lab distilling the history of outlaw country into four minutes, showcasing his guitarwork as it chugs along.

So many people complain about rodeo shows for one nitpicky reason or another when many times, these are the first musical experiences that most kids even undergo. These are the kind of rodeo shows that inspire a kid to tug at their parents' sleeve during the show and ask for a guitar and set someone on a musical journey.

This was my fifth Stapleton show, and even I am pondering hitting up a pawn shop this weekend for a guitar.

"Fire Away" saw the crowd of 72,634 match Stapleton's glow from the stage with the lights from their phones, creating a bed of twinkling cellular stars in the stadium, so much so that even Stapleton seemed overcome by it.

Stapleton and company savored every sip of set closer "Tennessee Whiskey" as the Ford fleet arrived to whisk them off into the night. RodeoHouston books actual musical acts, and Thursday night was a reminder of how magic one of these communal experiences can be.

Setlist

Parachute

Second One To Know

Hard Livin’

Starting Over

Millionaire

Arkansas

You Should Probably Leave

Nobody To Blame

Worry B Gone (Guy Clark cover)

Fire Away

Broken Halos

Tennesse Whiskey

Spoiler alert. A Houston chef’s dream of being crowned Top Chef World All-Star has come to an abrupt end.

Chef Dawn Burrell, the Olympian-turned-chef who reached the finals of Top Chef: Portland, has packed her knives. While she’ll have the opportunity to fight her way through Last Chance Kitchen to return to the main competition, her time on the London-based season is done for now.

Viewers had a pretty good idea that Burrell’s number might be up. She got a classic “loser’s edit” throughout the episode’s elimination challenge, which tasked the contestants with creating a rice-based dish.

For example, viewers heard ominous sounding music as she spoke her about the black rice congee she planned to make for the episode’s elimination challenge. “Time is not on our side today,” Burrell says to the camera as the soundtrack plays. “I have to have pressure cookers.”

Uh oh.

Throughout the challenge, things got worse. The rice isn’t finished by the end of the two hour prep time. Just before service, fellow contestant Amar Santana tastes her finished dish — Black Venus congee with black bean and five-spice braised oxtail — and tells the audience that “Dawn’s congee is one dimensional. I’m actually very surprised, because on her season, her flavor profiles were always there.”

After Amar’s comment, we see her taste her dish and shrug her shoulders as if to say “tastes alright to me.” Double uh oh. Sure enough, the judges aren’t impressed.

“If Dawn didn’t tell me this was congee, I wouldn’t have known,” Padma Lakshmi comments. “It feels like broth and crispy rice, not a creamy congee,” Gail Simmons adds.

At judges’ table, Tom Colicchio tells Burrell she missed the mark. “It ate more like black rice soup than congee,” he says. “It was eating crunchy,” Simmons adds.

The final verdict comes swiftly. “Dawn, please pack your knives and go. I’m sorry,” Lakshmi says.

Reached by phone, Burrell acknowledges that leaving on the second episode stings, particularly due to the elimination challenge being focused on rice.

“I love rice. I think that it’s a bridge in life and culture,” she tells CultureMap. “To have been eliminated on a challenge and an ingredient that I hold so dear was really a shocker for me. It did not feel good at all.”

In Burrell’s opinion, the dish’s initial problems stemmed from not using enough liquid to prepare the rice during prep time. She thinks she also suffered when another contestant made a congee dish that the judges preferred.

“I think if they only had one to go on, there would not have been that stark comparison between the two,” she says.

While it’s an unfortunate outcome for the chef, her professional life is looking up. Late August, the Afro-Asian restaurant she’s opening in Midtown’s The Ion mixed-use development, is finally on track for an early summer opening.

“You’ll be eating at Late August very soon,” she promises.