Lynyrd skynyrd jones eric church full#

The best way to describe this album might be ‘sprawling’, not just in the tones owing their obvious debts to Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp but in how Eric Church used the expanded run time over two and a half disks to adventure into sounds and genres he wouldn’t otherwise have room to touch on a traditional full-length without it turning into a mess - hell, he’s been down that road a few too many times already. Now again, the last time he tried this it didn’t really work, but Church is the sort of person who can pivot and make the right course correction, and he does learn from his missteps - whether Jay Joyce did is a different question, but okay, what did we get with Heart & Soul? Normally I have a rule in not covering exclusives not available to everyone, but I wanted to give this a chance with the expectation the EP was probably going to wind up on streaming or YouTube sooner or later, mostly because with this sort of structure Eric Church was using his added time off to make another ambitious grand slam.

To break this down, one album is called Heart, the other is called Soul, and there’s an EP called & that is only available to his diehard fanclub, which he calls the ‘Church choir’.

Lynyrd skynyrd jones eric church full#

Misunderstood - but even then, I’d struggle to call everything on that album pure country too.īut what I think truly flipped a switch with me on Eric Church was seeing him live in early 2019 - which I highly recommend everyone do, because not only was he going to play a full three hour set with no opener, he sounds way more powerful and anthemic in an arena or stadium compared to on record! And that raised way more questions than it should: for an artist who has been heavily criticized for not being able to sell the bombast he attempts, especially vocally, it made me seriously question just how much more his production had been hampering him from truly bringing to life the textured mid-to-late 80s Americana he worships so deeply, and it left me with more questions going into this project.

And then he followed it a year later with his best album in Mr. But even then, Church did release The Outsiders, and even if the progressive metal / country genre pileup experiment didn’t work - and I blame his longtime producer Jay Joyce for more of that and plenty of other things - it was at least fascinating. I find it easier to compare Eric Church to someone like Sturgill Simpson who treats genres with casual disinterest and will just open up into pure rock music live, but even that isn’t quite right, because Simpson is way more forward-thinking and wild than Church will ever be. Now the easy answer would be ‘he makes country music, he’s a Nashville fixture, duh’… and you know, for his first three albums I would say that makes sense, or even for isolated singles from his next three projects, but the truth is that Eric Church has been in his own lane for a while now and it’s worth noting that he knows it. So here’s a fun question: what genre of music does Eric Church make?