U.S. country music superstar Eric Church had so much new material that he released a triple album, Heart & Soul, in April 2021. He marked the anniversary with special edition box set versions, plus the announcement of the general release of the delightfully titled middle album, &. Here, he outlines his experiences in the recording studio.
“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…
Jay kept asking me the last three or four days, ‘Are we done?’ 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.”
He had a point because the initial releases helped him earn the 2020 CMA Entertainer of the Year award. The project was lauded by such diverse titles as Entertainment Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and Billboard in 2021.
You can find out more about the box sets here. Meanwhile, & – previously available only to Church’s fan club Church Choir – is being released to the general public and available to pre-order now.
