Eric Church has been known for doing things his own way.
He’s also taken plenty of chances throughout his nearly two-decade long career. The man has broken plenty of rules, from getting kicked off the Rascal Flatts tour while opening for them early in his career, cancelling a show at the last minute to go a college basketball game, to going behind his label’s back to send his surprise Mr. Misunderstood album to fans for free.
Needless to say. It’s all worked out to his benefit. Church is basically a modern-day legend of the genre. He’s done things his own way his entire career knowing that the fans and the music are what’s really the most important thing to having a real career.
When it came time for Church to headline Stagecoach Festival back in April of this year, he wanted to take a big chance with his performance…and he knew that it was one that was worth taking for him.
Church showed up for the festival and instead of playing a traditional set, he decided to play an hour-and-a-half long acoustic gospel medley, complete with a full church choir to back him up. I’m sure you remember the rest of the story.
It upset some of the drunks not looking for a church service that night and they packed up their sins to walk out on Church’s set. The best part about this entire story is that Church has no regrets for taking Stagecoach to church that night.
During a PBS documentary about his performance that night, Church spoke about how he came up with the idea to try something completely different and out of left field:
“I was thinking about my journey. I started out 7, 8 years old, Baptist church in North Carolina.
And I was honestly sitting on my couch one day and just started moving through hymns and then I started moving through soul stuff, started moving to covers, and I worked my way through my musical journey and I thought, ‘Ok, that would be kind of interesting if we never stopped.’
I don’t view the Stagecoach set as songs. I view it as one piece of work. And you’re really kinda going back in time musically. We’re using voice and we’re using my guitar, and we’re going to go in front of 80,000 people, where everything before that has been as big of a bombast as you can get, and we’re going to be the opposite of that. We’re going to take it back to the genesis of music, where this all started. At a church piano, with a choir.
You really get to look at musically what made me the artist I am. And it just started to germinate as an idea.”
It seemed simple. It was just Church and his guitar doing a medley of songs for an hour and a half. According to him…it was far from simple:
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done musically. I have more hours rehearsing on the Stagecoach show than any show of my life.”
During the set, members of the choir said they noticed fans leaving as the performance went on. Church didn’t care though:
“Kinda thought it would happen and kinda wanted it to happen in a way. Because I knew it would create the kind of response that I wanted to create, which was a challenging response. But I was mainly focused on the execution of the performance, because I knew that we needed to be great in order for this to live beyond the last note.”
When asked whether he would do it all over again, Church didn’t hesitate and said, “yes”.
Church doesn’t really care about being popular and liked. He wants to be remembered as a artist who doesn’t stick to the normal playbook of playing it safe:
“I think it’s going to be a defining moment of my career.”