It’s HERE.
If you’re a member of the Church Choir, the incredible fan club for Eric Church, then you more than likely have already heard the mythical & album. It was released as the middle part of Eric Church’s 3-part Heart & Soul album in April of 2021, but only the fan club could get access to the & portion.
Until today.
Featuring the previously released “Through My Ray-Bans” and his current single, “Doing Life With Me,” fans everywhere are treated to four new songs today including two of may favorite from the entire project in that of “Lone Wolf” and “Mad Mad,” as well as “Do Side” and “Kiss Her Goodbye.”
And we all know how the record came to be.
Holed up in the mountains of North Carolina at the beginning of the 2020, Eric and company spent nearly a month writing and recording a ton of new music for this project.
Writing in the morning, recording at night… there was no plan, there was no specific goal, the let creativity drive the entire process.
“I’ve always been intrigued when a song is born in a writer room – there is a magic that happens there. I wanted to put that in the studio form. So, every day, we would write a song in the morning and we would record the song that night.
Doing it that way allowed for the songwriters to get involved in the studio process and the musicians to be involved in the creative process. You felt a little bit like you were secretly doing something that was special, and you knew it… You started going, ‘hmm, wait ’til the world finds out about this.’”
And once they were finished, they were left with a massive collection of new songs.
However, how it would all come together remained to be seen.
“The interesting thing about this process is that Jay kept asking me the last three or four days, ‘Are we done?’ and at that time I didn’t know what the project was. I kept saying ‘God, this is going to be really hard. There’s a lot here. Is this a double album? And if it’s a double album, how do we leave out these five or six songs?’
I am the hardest critic on making sure every song deserves to be on the record, and I beat this thing to death going ‘this can’t be that good.’ But, it was just a special, special time and a special, special project that I think will be among our best.”
A special project, indeed.
& Tracklist:
“Through My Ray-Bans” (Eric Church, Luke Laird, Barry Dean)
“Doing Life With Me” (Eric Church, Casey Beathard, Jeffrey Steele)
“Do Side” (Eric Church, Casey Beathard)
“Kiss Her Goodbye” (Eric Church, Casey Beathard)
“Mad Man” (Eric Church, Casey Beathard)
“Lone Wolf” (Eric Church, Jeff Hyde, Ryan Tyndell)
