Hey, not every idea works out like you planned.
Sometimes an idea sounds great on paper and it just doesn’t come together like you hoped. Sometimes you think something’s going to be great, but it turns out to be a total flop.
And sometimes, you do something and accidentally make people think you’re going to kill Taylor Swift.
Happens to the best of us, right?
Well, maybe not, but it happened to Eric Church as he was gearing up to release his fourth studio album, The Outsiders.
Church was riding high from the success of his previous album, Chief, but it hadn’t been all that long since he had been kicked off the Me & My Gang Tour with Rascal Flatts for playing too long and too loud.
On that tour, he was replaced by a then-up and coming artist named Taylor Swift, and he joked with Taylor that he wanted her first gold record:
“Taylor called, because she’s great, and said, ‘Hey, I don’t want there to be any bad blood here between us, hope everything’s good.’”
(“Bad Blood?” I see what you did there Chief).
“I said ‘No, it’s great, everything’s good. They’re going to love you. And I said, ‘Only request I have is your first gold album, I want it.’”
Well not long after, Taylor got her first gold record for her self-titled debut album, and sure enough she presented it to Church with a note thanking him for opening up the opportunity for her on the Rascal Flatts tour:
“To Eric, Thanks for playing too loud and too long on the Flatts tour, I sincerely appreciate it. – Taylor Swift”
Today that gold record hangs in the Country Music Hall of Fame as a piece of country music history. And during her acceptance speech for the Pinnacle Award during the 2013 CMA Awards, Swift told the story of getting the call for that tour:
“I remember when I was 16 and I got the first phone call from Scott Borchetta, my label president. He said, ‘Can you be on the road in two days to open up for Rascal Flatts?’ And I just started screaming, I said, ‘This has to be a miracle,’ and he said, ‘No it’s not a miracle, Eric Church got fired for playing too long.’”
Well as he was gearing up to release The Outsiders, in December 2013 Church released a cryptic teaser video (as he often does) that was…well, a little creepy.
According to an article at the time from The Boot, the video featured a gloved hand that kinda resembled a serial killer while Taylor’s speech about Church getting fired played on an old-fashioned TV. And as Swift repeats the line “Eric Church got fired for playing too long,” the hand writes on the wall:
“One will rise, one will fall.”
Kinda weird? Sure. But if you know Church, you know that he’s done things outside the box for his entire career.
Well, apparently people who didn’t know Church took it as a threat towards Taylor Swift.
Saving Country Music wrote an article demanding that the teaser be taken down, as it could be seen as threatening towards the then-23-year old Swift, and numerous other calls were made for the video to be removed.
Well that’s what happened: The video was promptly taken down after just a few hours, and not long after another was released featuring the same mysterious gloved hand, assuring people that there was no beef between Eric and Taylor – and no, he wasn’t going to kill her:
“Eric adores Taylor for who she is and what she has done. You’re headed down the wrong trail so we must stop this. ‘One will rise and one will fall’ has nothing to do with Swift.”
Of course it wasn’t long after that Church announced that his album would be coming in February 2014, and that album would go on to hit the top of not only the Billboard Top Country Albums chart but also the all-genre Billboard Hot 200 chart, the second straight album from Chief to become the top album in all of music.
So hey, it all worked out in the end. Sometimes your plans just don’t come together like they should.
