If you listen to the new music Eric Church has been putting out lately, it’s easy to assume his latest tunes were created as a response to the unpredictable developments of 2020.
But the truth is, Eric created tracks like “Stick That in Your Country Song” and “Through My Ray-Bans” much earlier.
“The interesting thing about my perspective is we made — I don’t [want to] say album — we made this project,” he explains, “before COVID ever existed. So for me, we never came in reacting to COVID.”
“We made this project, we wrote this project, we recorded this project before we ever knew what COVID was,” he adds.
Still, the newly-crowned CMA Entertainer of the Year understands if you can’t help but see the music through the lens of the past few months.
“I think a lot of that is a little bit divine,” Eric reflects, “that if you listen to songs and you hear what the songs are, you very easily go, ‘This sounds like they were in the middle of quarantine.'”
“But we weren’t. I was not,” he continues. “So for me, it just kind of happened the way it was supposed to happen. I did not make this album after COVID happened. I made it before.”
So far, Eric hasn’t revealed when can expect his seventh studio project, the follow-up to 2018’s Desperate Man.
Last week, he debuted his new single, “Hell of a View,” on the 54th Annual CMA Awards, before taking home the night’s big prize.
By Stephen Hubbard
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