Country superstar Eric Church‘s new album is called “Evangeline vs. the Machine,” and if you know his iconoclastic ways — iconoclastic at least by the standards of country, and probably beyond that, too — then you know which side in that titular equation he’ll be favoring. While keeping his hit streaks mostly intact and certainly maintaining his arena headliner status, Church has gone out of his way to create individual moments, whether that’s in live appearances or, in this case, with a record that has strings, horns and a choir on nearly every track.
Variety talked with Church shortly before the release of the eight-track record this weekend, touching on what drew him to maintain such distinctive elements throughout the project, and how much he’ll draw that style into a fall tour that goes on sale May 9. Not surprisingly, even the trifurcated nature of the concerts he’s planning evidences a guy who’s thoughtfully going his own way and drawing a huge audience to follow him. He’s unbowed if, as with his Stagecoach appearance last year, there are a few complainers who carp that they don’t think Hank done it that way, or that Church himself did it the same way the last time around. Score one more for Evangeline…
What does the title “Evangeline vs. the Machine” mean to you? There is a song called “Evangeline” on the album, but that only constitutes half a title track.
You see how kids interact with their world, whether it’s TikTok or YouTube and and podcasts… We’re all tied to our phones and we’re tied to this overall machine. And to me it was creativity versus the mechanism that promotes that creativity. It’s a mechanism that also a lot of times can suppress the creativity, or round the edges and the sharpness off the creativity. I’ve had this happen even in my career. I did a show at Stagecoach a year ago that was incredibly creative, a one-of-a-kind show, but it was within the concept of a big, machine-based thing. And so this was really about a dichotomy between creativity and the machine that that creativity has to live and breathe in. I’ve seen, as I’ve gotten older, that it becomes harder and harder to be able to embrace what that creative spirit is, against something — against a world, really — that is disposable. When the next thing comes along quickly, you kind of lose the specialness of the moment of that creativity. So that’s a long way of explaining kind of the genesis of where this title came from.
Since you mentioned it, we just passed the one-year anniversary of your Stagecoach appearance, where you performed a special set with a choir, doing a lot of covers and trying to tie together some common threads in different types of music. There was so much chatter out of the festival, and those watching at home… like it was the greatest thing they’ve ever seen, or the opposite of that, if they wanted a straight hits set. It’s like there was not much in-between.
Yeah, which I love. But I mean, for me, the biggest thing was, Was it good? When the reaction happened… I have never, ever in my life and career worked harder or had more invested in a show than I had in that show, because it was really me and (choral) voices — that was it. So it was on me for 90 or 100 minutes to carry this thing. You can argue the mechanism might have been wrong at Stagecoach, where you have 30,000 TikToks out there. I understand that. But I also knew that going in, and I knew the biggest megaphone for providing a creative moment like that… I would certainly get more reaction at a place like that than I would in a regular show in Iowa. So I think we knew what we were kinda getting into there. But the biggest thing for me was, as I listened back to it: It was good. It was executed well. And that’s what it comes down to, to me.
It’s like Dylan goes electric at Newport, right? That didn’t go well, in the moment. People talk about that as a paradigm shift in music, but among people that were there in that crowd, and I talked to some people that were, it did not go well. And I think that sometimes you have to kind of put that out there creatively and go, “Hey, this is a one-time thing, and we’re giving it to this crowd for this moment. We’re doing it one time and we’re committing to the moment.” And you’ve just kind of gotta follow that compass and go with it and let it go.
This album won’t necessarily be polarizing, but it does take some chances, by locking in on a vibe. And it’s sort of easier to identify a vibe when you’re putting out one record instead of three at one time, which you did a few years ago with “Heart,” “&” and “Soul.” And it’s a pretty compact album, with eight songs, when you’ve said you had a lot more written but wanted it to be stylistically consisten. So how did you hone in on what the tone or style would be?
Well, I think a lot of this goes back to Stagecoach, in a way. Some of the sentiment of that show was really something that kind of bled into (the new album). It was in the time right after that that we went in the studio. And I’ve just been enamored with using orchestra, using strings, using horns, using a choir, and cutting that live. When we first went in and cut like the first song, we were taking a little bit of a flyer on “This is kind of a crazy idea, but I want to try it.” And to go in the studio and to hear those different instruments and their interpretation of the song, it was inspiring to me. I can remember when the voices got going and the strings got going. There was such tension on a song that, when I played it with my guitar, it didn’t have those colors and elements. So, back to your question, the hardest thing was: Not every song works in that setting.
Thinking about “Clap Hands,” the Tom Waits song… I was watching a movie or a series, and at the end, that Tom Waits song was playing, and it was like this big dramatic thing. But I heard a different element of it, and so I grabbed my guitar as it was ending… I paused the movie and I rewound it and I worked the song up when I heard that (in my head). That is not something that was ever on my radar. I knew the song, but it wasn’t something I’d ever thought about. And I was like, “Man, this would really work, with the talent we have in the room.” I worked it up acoustic and I sent it to Jay (Joyce, his longtime producer) and I was like, “Hey, what do you think about this?” He goes, “Let’s do it tomorrow.” And I walk in and we cut “Clap Hands.” So it was really kind of being really focused on what the room was, and what songs would fit that room.
How much variation on a theme did you allow yourself?
I mean, one of the latest songs we added was “Hands of Time,” which is our single. We added that last along with “Rocket’s White Lincoln.” The reason I added those later is, when you add strings and you add an orchestral element, there’s a real drama to it — this big, dramatic thickness. When we cut the six songs we had up till then, we had initially thought the record was gonna be six songs. We went back through it, and I was like, “Man, it all fits; it’s great. I love everything about it, but I feel like it’s a little serious. There’s no smile in the album. There’s no relief from the tension, from the drama.” And he said, “I totally agree.”
So we were able to kind of use the room as we built this album out and go: This is what we think we’re missing. So we added “Hands of Time,” and we added “Rocket’s White Lincoln” to give it a little bit of a smile, to give it a little bit of a different flavor, you know? But it worked within what we had in the room.
There were seven or eight songs (that didn’t make the album) that are hit songs. The last time we did a record, it was in January of 2020, before COVID hit. And the reason it came out in ‘21 is because, like everybody, we sat on that, the “Heart & Soul” album, because we didn’t know what the world was doing. So the last time we were all together in the studio was over five years ago. So I’ve got a lot of songwriting between there and now, and I had plenty of material that I knew fan-wise would would work. A lot of the songs that didn’t make this album are great songs, but it didn’t fit the room what the room could do to the song. I think when you conceive it and you sit down with it with a guitar, the most fun thing about this project is, there were places that some of these songs went that I would’ve never in a million years thought they could have gone when I sat with just my guitar.
What was the first song you did where you felt like you really locked into it?
For me, it was the first time I walked in the studio. Because when you walk in a studio, normally you have your band or your group and six or seven people. And when I walked in this time, I had 40 — you had a string section and a horn section and 10 people in a choir … So I think when you walk into that room and you see the bodies, it just changes the dynamic. When you add in strings, horns and choir, there’s so many more things that are going on in the course of a song. It’s not just you go in and “Hey, let’s make sure we get the drums sound right.” It was more performance-based, in a way, where the strings had their part down and everybody had their thing, and then it was up to me to perform it in the moment and try to capture it. And I think it was somewhere between “Bleed on Paper” and “Johnny,” which I had been doing at the residency show with a choir in Nashville, that the whole record took on a vibe.
The biggest thing now that I think we miss in music is, we cut a bunch of songs and records are 35 songs long, and it’s hard to get a vibe, you know? I’ve been in this 20 years and have had a bunch of records, and this time I wanted to have a vibe, like a “Pet Sounds” kind of deal, where it just has a thing. That’s really what we kind of leaned into. And we left some really big songs on the cutting room floor. We tried it. I came in and we cut four or five songs that are hits, and they’re gonna be hits, but it just didn’t work. You get to the end of it and go, “Yeah, we just didn’t add anything here.” So So I think that when you can find the vibe of an album and lean into that…
I know that’s probably antiquated and that I’m old, but that’s still the albums that I gravitate to. You know, the ones where you’ll be able to hear a song from this album and you’ll know it’s from that album. You don’t wonder what album it’s on. Jay and I both were like, “This may or may not work, but we want to lean into to that.”
As you said, you have got a lot of people playing or singing all at once, but it doesn’t sound lush at all times, necessarily. There are still some kind of edgy or minimalistic elements to it, even though you’ve got a lot of people on the tracks, so it’s an interesting sort of balance, between the wall of sound and something closer to what you normally do.
String-based music, orchestra music, goes back hundreds of years. But nowadays, I think that a lot of times what happens is, you end up using strings on your big power ballad, right? And then your string element becomes something that you could get from a keyboard. … I told Jay, “This should feel like a movie soundtrack.” And I said, “What strings do really well in the orchestra element is, they build tension. You can build that with guitars. You can build that with playing minor versus major. You can use some diminished elements of that to make it have tension. But strings just inherently have that.”
There’s a few songs in here that thematically kind of fall into a tradition you have explored throughout your career, which is writing music about music.
You’ve done it from “Springsteen” to “Record Year” and beyond, to a couple of the songs on this record. It’s like a little bit incestuous, in a good way, songs about the power of songs.
I’m a fan, man. I still think music is a magic carpet ride. It’s one of the most powerful things in the world in the way that it can transport you. There’s just not many things in life like how when you hear a song, you go back there to that memory you have. I have those songs where I can hear that song and I remember how old I was, I remember where I was, whether it’s driving around with a girlfriend or it’s on the lawn at a concert. It transports you to that place and time. And I think a lot of my entire career has been (evoking) those kind of things. Like, I could make catchy songwriter albums that don’t do that, and that’s fine, but that’s just what I gravitate to. And there’s these certain songs that have left an indelible mark on my life and make me feel younger. That’s what “Hands of Time” is; the whole chorus of that song is that. And I feel like there’s just a lot of people that feel that way, when they hear that music and crank up… I have this thing with my kids now, who are 13 and 10. We get in the car and they want to listen to the TikTok channel and all these new things, and I’m playing the Allman Brothers, and they’re going, “What is this?” I’m like, “No, trust me. You need to know this.” There’s just something as you get older that makes you appreciate your foundation and kind of the bible of what made you who you are musically.
If you’re gonna name-check a bunch of songs, like you do in “Hands of Time”…
You better pick good ones, man.
You did a benefit for the victims of Hurricane Helene in your native North Carolina recently, and played “Darkest Hour,” which is on this album. Do you feel like that’s directly related to the hurricane now in your mind?
Well, it didn’t start that way. Before the hurricane happened, and we went in and cut the song and… Listen, when you talk about fitting the room… I initially had that chorus at about three keys lower, and I was listening to a lot of Sly and the Family Stone, and there was that falsetto that had a charm to that I’d never done that way. And it’s hard as hell, by the way. Anyway, so we’d already done it. And then Hurricane Helene happened, and I remember calling my manager and going, “Listen, I know we’re way off schedule here. This is not what we should do. But I can’t imagine a song that fits a moment that we didn’t know was gonna happen like ‘Darkest Hour’.” And so we kind of went off our normal program and said, “Hey, let’s put that out.”
That wouldn’t have been our first song to put out, but it fit the moment and fit what that was. And I mean, I love the song. You know, there’s a lot of people that, if you’re a fan of me, it’s a polarizing thing. Which I don’t mind. I feel like that the polarization is, the longer I’ve done this, it’s the thing you should lean into more. Because without people knowing, I could have easily put out a song that was gonna go to No. 1. I don’t mean that arrogantly. I’ve just done this long enough now that I know what’s gonna work. And we had a bunch of those, but this was one that was like, “Hey, this is novel. This is not something that anybody has heard from us, or maybe has heard on country radio,” especially with the processional wedding march intro. It was just different, you know? And it was something that fit the song, fit the sentiment of what I felt like needed to happen in North Carolina, with people helping.
So we gave the song to North Carolina and we raised some money there. Sometimes people talk about letting music matter, and that was one of the times that it actually I think mattered. And I think at the end of my career, I think one of the things I’ll be most proud of is this area with “Darkest Hour,” kind of what we did there and how we did it.
You have just announced a tour. Any way to put in a nutshell your feelings about the tour or the scope of it?
My idea for the tour … As part of it we’re doing three shows at Red Rocks (in Colorado). Everything we do every stop on the tour is gonna be within the scope of those three nights. So the first night at Red Rocks, we’re gonna do an orchestra, big band kind of thing. Night two, we’re gonna do old-school band, the OG group. And then night three is me acoustic. So I think the (normal one-night-only) show will end up being in some way the three Red Rocks shows combined into one. You’re gonna have these moments of where we are now with “Evangeline,” and we’re gonna also bring some of the strings and horns into some of our older stuff. You know, you’ve seen “Mistress (Named Music),” you’ve seen “Knives (of New Orleans)” before, but not this way. And then we’ll kind of go into what got us here, and then I think the end of the show will be me and a guitar.
I like going big to small. I like seeing that throughout the course of a show. So it has a theme. It has a thing. And I think the fans will like that, where they understand the program and kind of where we’re heading.
Eric Church’s Free the Machine Tour itinerary:
starred dates on sale May 16; all others on sale May 9
Sept. 12 || Pittsburgh, Penn. || PPG Paints Arena || Elle King
Sept. 13 || Columbus, Ohio || Nationwide Arena || Elle King
Sept. 18 || Philadelphia, Penn. || Wells Fargo Center || Elle King*
Sept. 19 || Boston, Mass. || TD Garden || Elle King
Sept. 20 || Brooklyn, N.Y. || Barclays Center || Elle King
Sept. 25 || Green Bay, Wisc. || Resch Center || Marcus King Band
Sept. 26 || Milwaukee, Wisc. || Fiserv Forum || Marcus King Band
Sept. 27 || Des Moines, Iowa || Wells Fargo Arena || Marcus King Band
Oct. 2 || Detroit, Mich. || Little Caesars Arena || Marcus King Band
Oct. 3 || Lexington, Ky. || Rupp Arena || Marcus King Band
Oct. 9 || Indianapolis, Ind. || Gainbridge Fieldhouse || Marcus King Band
Oct. 10 || Grand Rapids, Mich. || Van Andel Arena || Marcus King Band
Oct. 11 || Cleveland, Ohio || Rocket Arena || Marcus King Band
Oct. 23 || Salt Lake City, Utah || Delta Center || Charles Wesley Godwin
Oct. 24 || Boise, Idaho || ExtraMile Arena || Charles Wesley Godwin
Oct. 25 || Spokane, Wash. || Spokane Arena || Charles Wesley Godwin
Nov. 6 || Vancouver, B.C. || Rogers Arena || Charles Wesley Godwin
Nov. 7 || Portland, Ore. || Moda Center || Charles Wesley Godwin
Nov. 8 || Seattle, Wash. || Climate Pledge Arena || Charles Wesley Godwin
Nov. 13 || Sacramento, Calif. || Golden 1 Center || Charles Wesley Godwin
Nov. 14 || Fresno, Calif. || SaveMart Center || Charles Wesley Godwin
Nov. 15 || Inglewood, Calif. || Intuit Dome || Charles Wesley Godwin
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