Country singer Eric Church talks about his love for Western North Carolina
Country singer Eric Church talks about his love for Western North Carolina, hard hit by Tropical Storm Helene, during a trip to Banner Elk Oct. 31, 2024.
If you’re talking to Eric Church, you’ve found a steadfast spirit devoted to the resonance of music.
He isn’t interested in churning out quick hits or viral bait for social media. He wants to make music that matters.
His just-released album, “Evangeline vs. the Machine,” his first since 2021, is flooded with meaning despite only being 36 minutes across eight songs
In the opening “Hands of Time,” Church, who turns 48 on May 3, acknowledges the realities of aging with a wink by namechecking songs from AC/DC, Bob Marley, Meat Loaf and other artists who spoke to him in his youth.
The album’s title spotlights the battle between technology’s soullessness and a creative muse, which he explains in the song “Evangeline” (“Take me down to the water/dunk my head into the river/raise your hands, all hail rock ‘n’ roll”).
“The way people consume music, it puts chains on creativity,” Church says from his home in Nashville. “The more machines involved in our lives, whether tech or phones or AI, the less life we’re able to experience.”
Church will bring his omnipresent dark glasses and his new round of rock-rooted country songs along with favorites such as “Smoke a Little Smoke,” “Springsteen,” and “Drink in My Hand” to arenas around the country starting Sept. 12 in Pittsburgh. Tickets for the Free the Machine tour, with guests Elle King, Marcus King Band and Wesley Godwin, are on sale at 10 a.m. local time on May 9 via ericchurch.com.
The concerts, Church says, will “start out in a big way and move to me and a guitar … go from big to small.”
In a thoughtful conversation, Church elaborated why he writes albums for his “10-year-old self,” is “bored” by the chaos of politics and why he has no regrets after last year’s polarizing Stagecoach performance.
Question: Both “Evangeline” and “Hands of Time” have some great classic song references. Are those songs also about the importance of music in your life?
Answer: One thousand percent. Music is the way I’ve dealt with anything good or bad in my life. I’m a fan first. Music was this siren for me at an early age and has always been the thing I’ve leaned on when I’ve had struggles, devastation, triumphs. A lot of those inspirational artists show up on this album. You think about the way they committed themselves to their art and I see that lacking today, that care and thoughtfulness.
Do you think it’s because the process of putting out music has changed?
I do. A lot of artists nowadays, you write a song on Tuesday and put it out Friday. There’s this flooding the zone. I’m an album kid and I still know it’s the right way. We’re going through a period that a lot of people aren’t listening to an album front to back. I see this with my kids that music becomes something happening in the background versus something that really affects them emotionally and artistically.
And it definitely wasn’t just a background for you growing up.
For me, it was something you committed yourself to and spent 45 minutes listening to that artist. You didn’t have the TV on or weren’t sitting there on your phone. When I make an album, I do it for my 10-year-old self who would have listened front to back. I don’t have a desire to make a song or two, here or there. I have to have something to say. That’s what inspires me. That’s what gives me my why. Even if I’m the guy yelling at clouds, I don’t care. I still believe if you’re going to be a longtime artist in the business and have a loyal fan base who you can play to in your 20s and your 50s, you have to build your career around albums.
The French horn that segues into “Evangeline” sounds like an homage to the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Is it?
(Laughs) Two things I didn’t see coming on this album were the French horn and the flute! Yeah, there’s a lot of Stones and a lot of The Band, who I also love.
A lot of the music on this record comes from the Stagecoach show last year, when instead of a regular show, it was just me and a choir. It might not have been the exact spot for it, but also the perfect spot because it got the biggest megaphone and was a one-of-a-kind show. At a festival where a lot was about 30,000 TikTokers and the whole “look at me” stuff, we wanted to do something that would last for fans, and that’s when I started thinking about the orchestral parts for the album. The enjoyment I got from that show was really doubling down on creativity. The more success you have, the more rope you have and I believe in using every strand of that rope.
You wrote “Johnny” after the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in 2023. Do you ever worry what some in your fan base will think about songs that take a stand against anything to do with guns?
No. I’ve been very upfront about this. I’m an artist who played the deadliest mass shooting in history in Vegas (2017’s Route 91 Harvest Festival, where 60 people were killed and more than 400 injured), and we lost a lot of fans at that. I own guns and am a Second Amendment guy, but I never really had a viewpoint one way or another until Vegas. When you leave something like that, it changes your viewpoints. I’m still a Second Amendment guy, but when it came to “Johnny” and school shootings, I’ve always said about the Vegas shootings, those wounds don’t heal, they scab over. When something else happens – and it is inevitable ‒ it rips the scabs off and they bleed again.
And “Johnny” came to you after dropping your sons (Boone, now 13, and Tennessee “Hawk”, now 10) off at school?
The school they go to is a mile from Covenant and the hardest thing I’ve ever done is drop them off the day after the shooting. I remember pulling off in the parking lot after they got out and I sat there and didn’t want to leave. I looked to my left and to my right and there were four or five other parents doing the same thing. There was a helplessness and fear to that.
As fate would have it, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” was on the radio and the lyric that jumped out at me was, “Johnny rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard because hell has broke loose in Georgia and the devil deals the cards. If you win, you get this shiny fiddle made of gold. If you lose, the devil gets your soul.” I remember thinking, if it were only true that the devil was just in Georgia, but he’s everywhere, wreaking havoc. Johnny kept rolling through my head, how we need that hero to fight the devil, and I went home and the song just fell out of me.
I’m sure it will resonate with a lot of people.
I think it’s my job. I’m not an overly political person. Politics, in general, bore me. It’s nonsense and chaos and makes my eyes and ears bleed, no matter what side you’re on. My viewpoints, a lot of times, are derived from things I’ve experienced and I did play Vegas and had fans killed and then played the Grand Ole Opry three days later and left seats open in memory of them. I’ve had those personal moments of loss and hurt, and when something else happens, like Covenant, the emotion was a little deeper and I was back in that same spot.
You wrote “Darkest Hour” before Hurricane Helene devastated part of your home state of North Carolina last year, but immediately released it and directed all royalties from the song to those affected. What was it like for you to play the benefit Concert for Carolina in October?
We still spend half our year in North Carolina and the community we were in was destroyed. We had just recorded the song and I felt that this needs to be out now. So we gave it to the people in perpetuity and that led to the concert, which is the most important musical thing I’ve done as far as concerts. The emotion of that night, the artists who came together, the quality of the music for 80,000 people … that’s when music is at its best, when it’s making a difference.
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