The Raw Honesty of Eric Church

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Eric Church is in a New Jersey parking lot with his nose inside a glass of bourbon. Before that image sparks any unseemly rumors, let’s look a little closer.

The parking lot is about a hundred feet directly behind the stage of the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, where in a few hours the country music star will be playing a sold-out show on his Outsiders Revival tour. We’re standing on a sectioned-off platform with a super-cool custom bar built inside a rolling road case. Playing quietly behind us is Outsiders Radio, the SiriusXM channel Church says he programs himself. We just heard one of Church’s own songs, in between a Whitney Houston deep cut and the Cars’ “Since You’re Gone.”

As for the bourbon, it’s Church’s newly launched brand, Whiskey JYPSI, and his master distiller and blender Ari Sussman is explaining how to appreciate the spirit’s scent without the alcohol numbing your nasal passages—breathe through your mouth with your snoot inside the glass. “I thought it sounded like bullshit, but it works,” says a grinning Church.

This kind of lesson actually means a lot to the country music star right now. He’s at the kind of complicated crossroads where platinum sellers can find themselves after a while. He’s nine albums deep into a career that’s rung up six solo No. 1 singles, established him as a touring juggernaut, and brought home the 2020 ACM Entertainer of the Year award. There’s even an Eric Church exhibit currently on display at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

But Church is known for his experimentation—his breakthrough hit in 2012 was titled “Springsteen,” which gives a sense of his ambition—and he still has a lot of music left to make. Being taken off the road during the pandemic lockdown also made him think long and hard about his future, above and beyond the songs.

“You kind of know your bread and butter, right?” he says from the crocodile-print seats of a banquette on his tour bus. “I can grab a guitar and go play somewhere and they’re gonna give me more money than they should give me. That was my life. And then Covid, and that was gone. At forty-six, I’m looking at that going, Okay, what does the next ten years look like? How much of that is going to be me walking out playing a certain number of songs versus doing other things?

“We built a career based on people trusting the brand, the authenticity, whatever,” he continues, using the first-person plural that’s a staple of the Nashville vocabulary. “I don’t know that we did that on purpose. We just did it, and we were able to have this collective thing that we represent musically, something that’s elevated. I think people respect it and that we built something that we could look at expanding beyond music. I thought we could take that trust out for a walk and see what it can do.”

Whiskey JYPSI is the first manifestation of this expansion, but there are more coming. Construction is under way on a small music venue and bar in Nashville’s Lower Broadway district called Chief’s (inspired by Church’s nickname and stage persona), scheduled to open in 2024. And in June, he was announced as one of a group of investors buying a majority stake in the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets from the previous owner—his good friend and golf buddy Michael Jordan.

“It is crazy,” he says, “where the music’s led us.”

Meantime, though, Church was also feeling like that music needed a reset. He was dissatisfied with his latest outing, the Gather Again tour, which opened in September 2021 during a time of great Covid confusion. “That whole tour was a pain in the ass,” he says. “It was hard every night. We kept having people fall in and out. Different municipalities had different rules. I hate to say it this way, because there were good shows, but it was my least favorite. It didn’t feel like we were back in the spirit of what we did.

“I really had some conversations with myself after that,” he continues. “Our stage sucked. I didn’t like playing in the round—I felt like I was turning my back on the audience every time I went somewhere. I did not have fun, and I came off that going, ‘I don’t know if I really want to keep doing this, and I don’t want to feel like I have to.’ You can tell an artist that has to be there versus wants to be, and I always want to be there.”

Then Church was invited by New Orleans dynamo Trombone Shorty to be part of his “Treme Threauxdown” jam session at Jazz Fest. “It was a who’s who, and I was the only country guy, and one of the only white guys,” he says. “I thought we were gonna do a cover, but then they wanted to do our song ‘Cold One,’ with no rehearsal, and it was killer. I walked off the stage and went, ‘Okay, that is what I’m fucking talking about!’ For four minutes of time, we found commonality onstage. So I don’t know where that’s gonna go, but that’s what I’m after.”

He put together a new configuration of his band, adding three horn players and three Black backup singers for a total of thirteen people onstage. He rolled it out in June for his performance as part of the CMA Fest show at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium—and got slammed for it. “Never been more disappointed by a concert,” tweeted one fan, while another posted, “Eric Church ends very wierd [sic] set and disappoints 50,000 fans.”

“I get it,” says Church with a sigh, “looking back on it. I had a slot. This isn’t my show—I’m playing with seven other artists. And I didn’t play ‘Springsteen,’ I didn’t play a bunch of stuff that they probably thought I would play. But it was good! I don’t care what the blowback was. I watched it, and that set was fucking great.

“Maybe we’re just not made for stuff like that,” he adds. “The last time I played the damn thing, I went out acoustic and played an entire medley that they never could air because I didn’t have any breaks in it. And basically, they told me not to come back again, ever. I was like, I tried to give you something special, and people still talk about that thing. But I was kind of invited not to come back—and they had me back this time, and I guess I blew it again!”

But it’s this kind of innovation, from the heavy rock of 2014’s The Outsiders to the introspective singer-songwriter approach of 2015’s Mr. Misunderstood, that’s earned Church such respect from his peers. “He continues to put out stuff that’s completely different, constantly pushing the boundaries of his songwriting or his live show, making these unique experiences for his fans,” says country megastar Luke Combs, describing Church’s approach. “When you come see our show, I want it to be different than the last time you came. And that’s something he does really well.”

On this night, the crowd at PNC in New Jersey is roaring and ready to follow Church wherever he dares to venture. Before launching into the song “Heart on Fire,” he nods to their energy and reassures them that they’ll be rewarded for it. “This is a revival. I will take you there. Your job is to go where I leadeth thee.”

Church’s sense of creative adventurousness is also what attracted Sussman, formerly the head of spirits development at the Artisan Distilling Program at Michigan State University. “Listening to his catalog, I heard a lot of styles of music,” says Sussman. “There’s references to blues, to bluegrass, soul vibes. And I thought, What might a whiskey be like with Eric Church’s approach to country music? What if there were an artistic way of blending together different whiskey-making traditions, whiskeys from different locations, made in different ways, and weaving them into an American whiskey? The liquid concept was directly inspired by listening to the artist’s music.”

For their first line, the Legacy Batch, that meant blending different whiskey categories together from various origins—combining Canadian whisky, bourbon whiskey, malt whiskey—instead of blending the grains before fermentation. It’s something Sussman says hasn’t been done before.

It also isn’t the usual celebrity path of doing a licensing deal with a liquor company and slapping your name on the label—in fact, Church was insistent that his name not appear on the Whiskey JYPSI bottle or branding. “In some ways, this is an anti-celebrity brand,” says Sussman. “The intention was to be creative and have fun. It’s not about flipping it for George Clooney money.” (Sussman also acknowledges that there was internal discussion about the name, which is taken from a Church lyric, concerning the fact that the word gypsy is sometimes considered a slur; he points to songs by Bob Dylan and Van Morrison to illustrate that the term is “an elevated level of existence within that sort of musical context” and also adds that “I’m Jewish—I have personal sensitivity to the use of words that can lead to gas chambers.”)

Church is taking a similarly unconventional approach to Chief’s, which he wants to stand out on a strip that already has numerous bars backed by stars from Luke Bryan to Miranda Lambert to Kid Rock. “I saw Springsteen on Broadway,” he says, “and one of my favorite lines was when he called himself a fraud—he talked about all the stuff he sings about and he said, ‘You know what? I’m a fraud. I never did any of that.’ I thought that was one of the most rock ’n’ roll moments I’ve ever seen. It floored me. Jaw dropped. As a fan, when would I ever get to hear that, unless I’m sitting on his bus?

“So that was when I thought, What if we did a venue in Nashville where I could do a show with that same kind of raw honesty? There’s going to be a lot of songs that nobody’s heard, there’s gonna be some stuff unique for that place. We’ll talk about Vegas [the 2017 massacre at the Route 91 Harvest music festival], talk about the loss of my brother, talk about almost dying—there’s a period in my life where I had some shit going on and I didn’t really address it. This would be a great place to do something like that— very intimate, 450 seats—and do three shows a week for a couple months, kind of Broadway style.”

He gave the concept a bit of a test run with two shows at the Country Music Hall of Fame the week after the New Jersey show, performing solo with voice-overs in between songs that read press coverage from the time—like a review from 2005, he recounts with a laugh, that said, “Obviously, Eric Church’s limitation is going to be the fact that he just can’t sing.”

As for buying into his hometown basketball franchise, Church says that Michael Jordan talked him into it. “He’s hard to say no to,” he says. “So when he calls and tells you to buy an NBA team, first you have a moment of transparent terror, but you find a way to say yes.” Church notes that his two sons, ages eight and eleven, are big basketball fans, but their team is the Memphis Grizzlies. “I’m working to get them on the Hornets side. I’m making inroads.”

Church is well aware that he has no real idea how any of these moves are going to turn out. He points to the controversy that surrounded his decision to postpone a 2022 concert so that he could take his kids to a Final Four game between the University of North Carolina and Duke. (He later made up the date with a free show). He took a lot of heat for it, but at the press conference announcing his participation in the Hornets sale, it was brought up as evidence of his dedication to Carolina basketball. “In the moment, it looks like the house is on fire,” he says, “but you just never know—you got to sit back a minute and let it all wash out.”

He notes that things are equally unpredictable in the country music business these days and expresses special admiration for artists more associated with the Americana community, such as Tyler Childers and Brandi Carlile. “I don’t think you have to have radio now,” he says. “I don’t think you have to have a label, I don’t think you have to win CMA Vocalist of the Year—I don’t think any of that is necessary anymore. There’s people in the country music industry that have had multiple No. 1 songs that couldn’t play their own high school, and there's guys out here that have never, ever been on country radio that are doing eight thousand tickets.”

And then, of course, there’s Taylor Swift, in whose career Church plays an interesting role: One of her early big breaks came when he got thrown out of an opening slot on a Rascal Flatts tour for playing over his allotted time and was replaced by Swift.

“She’s an incredible writer,” he says. “Her music and the quality of her writing at a very young age was great, and it’s gotten better. When you have ten or fifteen thousand people outside of stadiums, I haven’t seen that. Not Michael Jackson, not Prince, I’ve never seen that. And to be that good? I mean, goddamn—that’s some unicorn shit right there.”

Lately, though, the biggest story in country music has been the political divisions sown by some of its stars and the outrage around songs like Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” or the proper response to Morgan Wallen getting caught using the N-word on tape.

Church occupies a unique space in Nashville: He spoke up about rethinking gun-control policies in the wake of the slaughter in Vegas, posed for the cover of Billboard getting his Covid vaccination, wrote about hate and racism in the song “Kill a Word.” He’s the kind of country artist who got the call to sing the national anthem alongside R&B singer Jazmine Sullivan at the 2021 Super Bowl.

But he’s also recorded with Aldean and maintains a friendship with Wallen. (Church said that Wallen’s use of the slur was “indefensible,” but Church appears on Wallen’s latest album and Wallen shared photos of them fishing together after the incident.) Church notes that he’s taken on something of a mentor role for some of the artists his work has influenced. It’s not surprising that he’s diplomatic about the culture’s current state of affairs.

“I do think it will define this era, but I think the era’s fleeting and that shit doesn’t last,” he says. “Right now, especially in a political season, everybody’s trying to use whatever weapon they can use to motivate whatever side they’re on. And that is new, except maybe the Vietnam War era. But I just think that stuff’s gonna fall away and the really good music, just like with that era, will be what we remember twenty years from now. I don’t think a song that becomes popular or not popular because of whatever political aspirations the consumer has is really going to matter.”

Church seems more concerned with building bridges than picking sides. He believes that the big-city worldview often distorts the cultural conversation.“New York and L.A. sometimes get way too involved in what’s happening in New York and L.A., but there’s a lot of people in between,” he says. “And I say that as somebody who built our career in Middle America and the rust belt. There’s a lot of that going on now, where everybody’s tribal, everybody’s all regionalized in their little world and their political views. As somebody that jumps on a tour bus and travels to all these places, that is missing the fucking boat. I think we do that with politicians, too. We focus on one area of who we are and not like, ‘Hey, bro, we’re all in this.’ There’s a big fucking country here.”

With everything else going on, Eric Church is also just trying to write some songs. “I’ve got a ton,” he says. “If anything, the biggest problem is I’m a little unfocused creatively—I can play you five songs right now and you’re gonna go, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you? This is all over the place.’ I have a couple of things speaking to me, but I don’t have it figured out.

“But I love thinking about where we’re gonna go. I like having the horns in the back. You could lean into that. You could do orchestral stuff. There's a lot of shit you could do. And I’m into that. It may work, it may not. But to not chase that, and to just sit back and go, ‘Well, I’m going to try to get something to radio, add two more songs to your catalog that you can play,’ that feels wrong to me. So like always, I’ll know when I know. And honestly? It’s probably going to get wilder.”

Photo at top: Eric Church in Nashville, Tenn., on Sept. 7, 2023. Photography by Robby Klein; styling by Katy Robbins; grooming by Alex Wingo. (Jacket by John Varvatos; tee by Robert Barakett; jeans by Diesel; sunglasses by Ray-Ban.)

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