He’s now one of the most recognized and successful mainstream artists in country music… but there was a time when Eric Church was the undisputed underdog.
Eric has spent decades in the industry, doing things his way, and now, he has tons of other business ventures and mentors younger artists, like Ella Langley, and he’s certainly made it in terms of his legendary career up to this point.
And during an appearance on the Bussin’ With the Boys podcast today, Eric says he very much saw other artists as competition when he was coming up, and there were tons of them that he had real beef with. He often felt like he was overlooked for others who most people wouldn’t even know now, so many years later, and it’s because he just believed so much in his music and was working his a** off to build a solid career.
But for a long time, he saw others getting nominated for awards, and as he put it, “flying past me” to achieve success when it might have been undeserved. Eric admitted that he had a chip on his shoulder, so to speak, because of it, though not everyone he was up against was unworthy. Eric described it as a “lion know[ing] a lion,” and eventually, the cream rises to the top and it all worked out:
“Oh, there’s been a bunch. Well, early on, the thing that aggravated me is, we’re out there grinding and working hard, and I believe in our music, and I think it’s good, and then I’m seeing all these guys who will have a hit that, you don’t even know them now. But at that time, they were all flying past me and they were the new thing. They’d win the award, they would get nominated, all that stuff.
So I took that personal. I wore a chip on my shoulder for a while with that stuff. And then there’s been competition, yeah, there’s been a bunch. I mean, guys that are great. That’s just like sports though, like, I always say this, a lion knows a lion. And I know the ones that I’ve encountered that are good and are real, and I know the ones that aren’t.
And it won’t be long before the other people realize the same thing, but there are some that have been lions, that are lions, and I know it. And those are the ones that are fun to you know get there and mix it up with.”
He thinks it’s actually a good thing to have that kind of healthy competition with people who are just as good, if not better, than you, and he welcomes that sort of challenge even still:
“You actually look at him and go, yeah man, that’s a dude, you know. And it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing when I go to make a record, or I go to write a song, I know that dude‘s out stalking around. That’s good. It’s a competition. It’s a good thing.”
In many ways, Eric is in a class of his own in terms of being a mainstream country star who has managed to still fight against the machine so many times, and I think that has given him a really unique perspective and honestly, most country artists usually say there isn’t any competition, or there’s never any beef, so it’s really refreshing to hear actually admit that’s true, just like any other profession.
And like he says, that can actually be a good thing.
Check out the full podcast below.
