Welcome to a new year and a new limited series which we are calling ‘What the Year Ahead Holds.’ In this series we’ll be looking at what you can expect from your favourite Country music stars in 2024 in both a personal and professional capacity. Previous episodes have focused on Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen and Carrie Underwood and now we turn our thoughts to the Chief himself, Eric Church.
2023 was a quiet year for Eric Church which was well deserved after a fairly manic 2021 and 2022. Embarking on a behemoth tour in September of 2021 that, for all intents and purposes, kept him out on the road for a year, Church took his touring foot off the peddle a little in ’23 and restricted the live shows to a summer though October set of dates. Obviously releasing three albums in 2021 also took a lot of creative energy and effort that Church was well rewarded for with the end results but new music has been thin on the ground since.
Looking ahead to 2024 there are a smattering of dates on the books for shows between March and August but everything is ominously quiet in the Church camp right now so we’d expect an album and world tour to be not that long away in the announcing. Obviously any forthcoming album will probably be recorded without the input of of long-time singer and collaborator Joanna Cotten after she left the camp in 2022 which might well alter the singer’s outlook and approach a little to new songs.
The way Eric Church recorded the three ‘Heart & Soul’ albums was unusual in that he locked himself and his team away for a period of 28 days in the middle of the North Carolina woods during the COVID pandemic and they wrote a song every day for that duration. Together with producer Jay Joyce, Church headed to the mountain town of Banner Elk where they set up a makeshift recording studio in a restaurant that had closed its doors for the winter. They moved the tables out of the dining room and turned the basement into a drum booth. What happened next was lightning in a bottle that probably could not be replicated again and, if we know Eric Church, it’s not something he’d want to replicate anyway, given the way he likes to push his own creative boundaries.
Given the current lurch in the industry towards 80s style production and a heavier guitar sound influenced by the likes of Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs, we wonder if Eric Church will return in the third quarter or fourth quarter of this year with a stripped back, simple 12 track album that is fairly high tempo and rocking, similar in style to ‘The Outsiders’? We loved the Springsteen-esque vibe he captured on tracks like ‘Heart of the Night’ and ‘Russian Roulette’ on his previous ‘Heart & Soul’ release and that would be an avenue well worth exploring for him as he grows and develops as an artist.
Expect a new album in late 2024 and then the obligatory world tour through 2025 and into 2026. Whether it’s two nights at each venue and different setlists like the last tour is another matter altogether though – like the album, we think this next phase of Erich Church’s career will be pared back a little, simple, uncompromising and punkish. In and out, guitars burning, job done.
