Eric Church is up for four CMA Awards, including Album of the Year for The Outsiders, Male Vocalist and Single and Song of the Year for “Give Me Back My Hometown.” In 2012, he picked up the Album of the Year award for his multi-platinum record Chief, and he said backstage he wanted a win for his fans and the people who had worked so hard to get him to that point.

“It’s not something that I think about for me,” says Eric. “I never put a lot of weight on awards, but I’ve always wanted it for the people who believed in me from the beginning, who have been so passionate about what we do.”

The 48th Annual CMA Awards will be broadcast live from Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena Wednesday (November 5th) at 8pm ET on ABC.

Eric Church (CMA 2012 backstage) OC: …what we do. :12
“It’s not something that I think about for me. I never put a lot of weight on awards, but I’ve always wanted it for the people who believed in me from the beginning, who have been so passionate about what we do.”

Eric Church (making the album) OC: …as an album. :41
“I think a lot of when you make an album, you can’t go in with a preconceived notion of here’s what it is. You’ve got to be committed and take the time in the process to let the creativity to lead you there. And I think for us, I think that’s what we did. We let the songs dictate what was next. There’s two songs on this album that if you pull them out of the album, I like ‘em, [but] I just don’t love ‘em near as much as if you put ‘em back in because of the space that they give the songs in-between and what I feel when I listen to the record. By themselves? Fine, but in its spot, I love ‘em. It’s an album. It’s start to finish. Shuffle is gonna aggravate me on this if people play shuffle, because it’s not right. It needs to be listened to as an album.”

Eric Church (Give Me Back My Hometown) OC: …songwriter. :41
“I love that it’s about ‘Give Me Back My Hometown,’ but it’s about a guy that’s still in his hometown. He’s in the most familiar place, the place he knows better than anything, but because his female lover left him there, all those places that he knows so well, become so haunting and foreign to him. The loneliness and sadness of it, it’s one of the sadder songs we’ve ever done. To be at the place that you grow up at that is your home, and the person that left you there took that from you, there’s nothing lonelier than that. So, I love that dichotomy of ‘Give Me Back My Hometown,’ when the person’s in it, they’re standing in it, and that appealed to me as a songwriter.”