Over the last 8 days Eric Church has released 3 albums.
Last Friday, Heart came out
This past Tuesday & was shared exclusively with his fan club, the Church Choir
And now the final piece of the musical puzzle, Soul, is out…
When it can to the creative process of making these 3 albums, Eric wanted to shake things up — so he packed up and left Nashville.
He took everyone, and everything he needed to North Caroline and set up a new “studio” in a rented restaurant. If that sounds unusual — that’s exactly what Eric wanted. He was looking to create an artistic atmosphere unlike any other…and it wasn’t just the location that changed when it came to the recording process.
Eric’s goal was to work on one track each day…write it, arrange it, record it, and finish it. All this was to be done with everyone having a say in the process.
Eric explains, “One of the big things people may not understand is when I invited these people to come up — I want people to understand the process – So, I committed to I will get up in the morning and we’re going to write a song or create a piece of work that we are going to record that night, and then we’re going to do it again and again and again. And I think that there’s something about the commitment to the 24-hour period and then the forget-ability of the next period that made this work. So, when we’re in the studio and I’ve been – somebody, I remember Jay (Joyce) asking him one day he said, ‘Well, hey, how does the bridge go?’ And I went, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ’I just wrote it an hour ago. I have no cl…– where do you think the bridge goes?’ But being in that moment, that creative moment and not choking it out– this is the end of the creative moment, let’s evaluate it. We let the creative moment continue to the players, to the songwriters.”
Using this method of creating the project Heart & Soul led to an interesting end result when it came time for Eric to review the music, “I’ll never forget the last day of the project. I remember sitting beside Artisnal, which is the restaurant, in my bus, and I remember sitting there listening to the songs back and, you know, it was interesting for me because my interaction with these songs were daily. I didn’t have a long memory. So, as I listened back, I listened back as a fan. I didn’t listen back as the guy that had created this to make a statement. I was a fan. I knew these songs for 24 hours, and then I made another one.”
Soul contains Eric’s current single, “Hell Of A View” — and he shares the story of the day that it was created, “Writing ‘Hell of a View,’ we were in North Carolina. We were in the mountains, and actually that song, I’d went out for a jog one day. We had a pretty good weather day and Casey Beatherd, one of the writers on the song, had been with Monty Criswell earlier. They had kind of worked on some of the song and hadn’t played it for me yet. I went out to jog and I came back in, and Casey was kind of standing up looking out the window and I can tell he’s playing. And when I opened the door, he looked up at me and he said, ‘Don’t say anything. You’ve got to hear this. This is really good.’ He immediately started playing the first part of the song. [One] verse or so, I was hooked. I was in. I loved the way he had the line, ‘caught your wings on fire/when I smoked my Bronco tires out of town,’ and I just thought that was such a great line, and I was smitten with it at that point of time. So, we finished it that night, later that day/night and then recorded it, and it came out great. I knew it was pretty special when it went down. It was always a song that I knew was a big hit, but at the same time it has that timeless quality to it and it’s gonna be one of our biggest ones.”
Heart & Soul from Eric Church is available now…
Photo Courtesy of Eric Church
