Eric Church releases his new album, Desperate Man, on Friday (October 5th), and we’ve got a one-hour radio special, featuring some of the tracks from the new album, as well as a few of his hits (see link below).
“What I thought this album was going to be—well, it wasn’t that at all,” says Eric Church. “But once we found the template and got on the right path, we were really knocking them down. It took a while, but then we got most of the album done in a few days.”
Church’s sixth studio album, Desperate Man, available October 5th, marks the end of the longest break in his career between putting out new music. In the three years since the sudden, surprise release of Mr. Misunderstood, though, he has experienced some of the highest peaks and some of the biggest challenges in his work and in his life and most are present in this new collection of songs.
Since his last recordings, Church had also been through a serious health scare and had performed at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, where dozens of country music fans lost their lives. “I still felt shook up pretty good,” he says. “I wasn’t ready yet, wasn’t settled from all that happened—I was still reeling from Vegas, I felt displaced and not really connected to anything. I had to get back to enjoying what we were making and finding refuge in the music as a bit of an anchor.”
He called his manager and said that he might need to take a break and hold off on the recording sessions (“that’s never happened to me before,” he notes). But then came a breakthrough, in the form of two songs that represented an entirely new direction.
“The Snake” is a menacing, spoken-word parable with a political undertone. “The rattlesnake and the copperhead—that’s left/right, blue/red, however you say it,” says Church. “They sit there and fight all day to rile people up and then go get a drink. They’re working together while the whole world is burning down.”
Then, immediately after, he wrote a simple song called “Hippie Radio,” an acoustic meditation on the ways that music is there to mark different phases in your life. And suddenly, Church started to get a notion of where this project might be headed. “It was making my Spidey Sense go up,” says Church. “It was different, soulful, a total left turn from what we had been doing. The coolness started to come in. Plus, it was saying something, and that’s what artists are supposed to do—give us guidance for where we are and where we’re headed.”
The sessions became more loose and experimental. The bulk of the material was written in the studio; he came up with “Hangin’ Around” in an hour and cut it that same day. For “Drowning Man,” Joyce secretly set up a microphone under Church’s foot, and the tapping forms the main kick on the final drum track. “My creative juices were really flowing,” says Church. “I was trying different sounds and calling more audibles than ever before. I really enjoyed the journey of where it was starting to take me.”
We are celebrating this new release with a one-hour special featuring several tracks from the new album, plus a few of Eric’s biggest hits.
The program is non-exclusive and commercial-free.
TOTAL RUNNING TIME:
@ One hour – delivery via link Wednesday evening (October 3rd)
CLEARANCE WINDOW:
Friday, October 5th – Sunday, October 14th
To download the album special, click here.
