Had this one on repeat for the last week.
When Eric Church dropped Heart from his latest three-album project last week, there was one song in particular that seemed to leave fans deeply divided: “Heart of the Night.”
People either absolutely loved it or were left scratching their heads.
And I can see why – I guess. It’s definitely different than anything Eric’s done before. It’s rock opera – the kind of song you could easily hear in a Broadway musical or at a Queen concert.
But if you ask Eric what it is?
It’s Meat Loaf.
“[Producer Jay Joyce] goes ‘You can’t do all those hits.’ I said ‘Dude, it’s Meat Loaf. Let’s do it.'”
Eric also addressed the song’s sound on his recent Amazon Music live Q&A:
“I love the dramatic nature of a lot of the songs, I love the way they developed. I remember a moment of time and a conversation I had with my producer Jay, because he questioned ‘Is this too Meat Loaf?’
I said ‘Dude, if you’re gonna go Meat Loaf, you gotta go Meat Loaf.’
There’s no half Meat Loaf. There’s no half Loaf.”
And in a recent Rolling Stone interview, Eric revealed that the song may have never happened without the unconventional creative process that he took for his project, moving his entire team to a restaurant-turned-recording-studio in the mountains of North Carolina and writing and recording a song each day for a month.
According to Eric, if he had done it the “normal” way, the usual vetting processes might have gotten in the way of the creativity on this one:
“If we had analyzed it and brought it back and put it through the normal channels, we would have gotten to the end and said, “Hm, let’s cut ‘Heart on Fire.’
That’s what made this different. We didn’t do that. We said, ‘This is what we wrote today. Let’s commit ourselves to this, have fun with it, and let’s do it.’ And I’ve never made an album that way.”
That’s what’s so incredible about this new project: It’s a glimpse at the result of a completely different creative process, that resulted in a completely different product than anything we’ve ever seen from Eric Church.
“Heart of the Night” in particular, with its lyrics fantasizing about running away “into the chest of the still-beating heart of the night” set to a brash, theatrical soundtrack that would make Elton John and Queen proud, manages to be both unique and familiar at the same time.
“Put lightning in this Thunderbird ‘tll the metal comes alive
The rhythm of the road will give these horses wings to fly
And my true north is anywhere I can leave it all behind
Let’s point this thing west into the chest of the still beating heart of the night.”
I mean, who can’t relate to that?
