CLEVELAND, Ohio – The apple don’t fall too far from the tree, as the grammatically incorrect but nevertheless accurate Southern aphorism goes, and Eric Church knows it.
Bruce Springsteen was among the first to do marathon concerts – as long as four hours or more – and now his country acolyte (who happened to have had a huge hit called “Springsteen”) is following suit.
“First of all, everybody knows I’ve made no bones about the fact that I am a massive [Bruce] Springsteen fan,” said Church, calling from his home outside Nashville to talk about his “Holdin’ My Own Tour” stop at Quicken Loans Arena on Friday, Feb. 24.
It’s a tour that will see Church play a Springsteenlike 31/2-hour show, with a small break in between. No opening act, just Church and his band. And he’s doing it, he said, for much the same reason that Springsteen does:
He and Springsteen both “had all these songs that had their own life outside the life they were supposed to have,” Church said. “When you can take the songs that weren’t commercial songs and turn them into anthems – ‘Born to Run’ wasn’t a commercial success at first.
“For me, it’s just one of those things where the parallels match up,” said Church.
Like Springsteen, Church leaves nothing in the dressing room when he goes out to do a show.
“Going to a Bruce concert, there’s just something to being a fan in that setting, seeing that he’s giving you everything he’s got,” Church said. “I’ve said it many times: ‘Let’s do it again, just not tonight because I’m spent!’ ”
For Church, the surprise isn’t that he’s doing marathon shows – given his nature and work ethic, that probably was going to happen regardless. But doing it this early in his career is a bit of a stunner.
“We’re doing it because we’re able to, but I say that because we shouldn’t be able to,” he said. “Look at the songs we’ve had. We’ve had five No. 1s on our own, and we get credit for seven because I sang on a couple of duets.
“We shouldn’t be able to play that long,” he said.
But Church has built his career not by subtracting songs from each of his five albums each time a new one came out, but by adding them. So it almost was inevitable that a marathon show was in the cards. Out of the 57 or so songs he’s recorded, at least 38 will be on Friday’s set list.
“When you create that kind of culture, you owe it to the songs, and you owe it to how you got there, to play those songs,” he said.
Of course, his national “career” may be only 12 years long, dating from “Sinners Like Me” in 2006 to “Mr. Misunderstood” in 2015, but Church has spent a lifetime paying dues, playing in bars, where 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. is the usual gig time.
“I got a text from Keith Urban and he asked me, ‘How are you holding up?’ I told him I was good and he called me a [sissy],’ ” Church said, laughing. “He said, ‘You used to play four or five hours a night in those [crappy] bars and clubs, where you’d have nine people on a good night.’ ”
Church had one response:
“Well played, because he’s done it before, too,” he said. “It was very good to remind me.”
Though he acknowledged the shows themselves are a test of endurance – “31/2 hours of running around a stage in cowboy boots has been pretty physical,” he said — “it’s been a long time since I played those bars and clubs 20 years ago.”
But don’t expect anything less than his best effort from Church.
“I told the band that we’ve always outworked everybody,” he said. “When [somebody else] played 100 shows a year, we played 220, and that was in 2009. Every time we tour, we’ve outworked them.”
For many, that might be measured by how it translates into a bigger bank account, and eventually, that probably will happen for Church. But that is hardly his goal or motivation.
“For me, I’ve had less commercial success or chart radio success than any of my peers, but I’ve never really looked at it that way,” Church said. “What I look at now is we’ve made it about the album – there’s no album left behind.”
And that has worked because Church is among a new breed of writer who is making what at its heart is old-school country music. Not with steel guitars and such, but with lyrics that mean something.
“For me, that’s what separates country music from other genres – it’s the heart of the troubadour,” he said. “People can play with the semantics of what the music is . . . but the song is always the foundation of country music.”
And come Friday night, he’ll have 31/2 hours to prove it.
PREVIEW Eric Church When: 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 24.
Where: Quicken Loans Arena, 1 Center Court, Cleveland.
Tickets: $25 to $89, plus fees, at the box office, online at theqarena.com and by phone at 1-888-894-9424.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
