Eric Church getting into some dark shit in the wee hours of the morning.
One of the songs I’ve been digging a lot lately is the Eric Church and Chris Janson duet, “You, Me & The River,” a cut off Janson’s recently released studio album, All In.
Written solely by Eric Church himself, it’s a dark and ominous, body dumping murder ballad about a cheating lover.
The album also features another Eric Church co-write on it called “Flag On The Wall” that I dig, but we’ll save that for another time.
Anyways, so how did this murder ballad from the desk of Eric Church get to Chris Janson? As it turns out, Janson got the message at three in the morning with an Eric Church work tape.
According to an interview with Music Row, Janson had just landed from a late flight:
“I got a text message when I landed from White Fish, Montana. I was playing in Montana and also did some fishing there, ironically. I landed in the wee hours of the morning back in Nashville and I got a ping on my phone.
It was the work tape of “You, Me & The River.” Not even a demo, just a guitar vocal of Church singing it. It was really eerie sounding and dark and ominous.
He texted me and said, ‘This is a little dark, but see what you think about it.’ It was like 3:30 in the morning and I listened to it and I’m like, ‘Dang, this is kind of scary, in a good way.’”
So Janson decided to take a shot and ask him to duet it.
And it worked:
“I texted him back, I didn’t think he would be up that time, and said, ‘I love this.’ I just threw it out there. If you don’t dream big, how are you going to win big? What’s the worst that could happen?
So I hit him back and I was like, ‘I love this. Why don’t we do a duet?’ He hit me right back and said, ‘I’m in.’
It was a really incredible moment. I’ll never forget it. Eric came into the studio. We co-produced it together and we recorded it live together with the band. It was really an organic process and really cool. He could not be a greater friend and even mentor in a lot of ways.”
And the rest is history…
