After a devastating 2018, Eric Church left Nashville and recorded the three-part Heart & Soul in a restaurant.
He talks about its origins and his role in country music with EW.
Eric Churchmay be the only country star to walk into a restaurant and walk out with three albums.
“I think it’s our job, if we’re gonna be artists, if we’re gonna be pillars of this format, it’s about moving the format forward,” says Church.Anthony D’Angio
Artisanal, a Michelin-starred eatery nearby, is one of his favorite places to eat in the entire world.
“The whole restaurant is reclaimed barn wood the ceiling, everything,” he says.
In January 2020, that’s exactly what it became.
Church was in dire need of a reset, which is what brought him back to Banner Elk.
“Coming off ofDesperate Man, I felt like I needed to do something different,” he says.
“The three-part project also reflects the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of the sessions that made it.
Instead of constructing an album over the course of a long stretch, they kept things at breakneck speed.
It was an ambitious mission, and it didn’t start smoothly.
To me, that’s when all the interesting things happen, when you have limitations.”
“You start breaking them down; you put ‘em in categories.
In this instance, it was never evaluated that way.
What was written that day was recorded that day, good, bad, or ugly.
We just did it.
I didn’t think about the vulnerability.
I just wrote about what was on my heart.
I haven’t done that on any album [before].”
It’s an indicting contrast to the pastoral odes of his peers.
He considers it to be one of the proudest moments of his career.)
Now, me saying that is one thing, and doing it is the other.
It’s about not staying where you are.
It’s about actually trying to go somewhere.
I believe that’s our responsibility.
That’s our job.
“The river just looked like it was gonna start flooding everywhere,” Joyce remembers.
“The current was super fast.
I can hear it, still, in that track.
It was seriously one of those moments where we were lucky we got it on tape.”
“I love what [‘Country Song’] says.
I love the sentiment and the ballsiness of it.
And I dig that.”
He’d already survived the storm.
Roaring back at it was just an extremely Eric Church thing to do.
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