Eric Church is a much different person and artist, than he used to be. Church by his own admission, struggled to have hits at radio in the beginning. It was a sharp cry from what Church expected when he moved from North Carolina, with a singular goal of being a country music superstar.

“I expected to go into Nashville and go, ‘You’re welcome. I’m here to save you guys,'” Church recalls on the Today Show with a chuckle. “They didn’t like my songs, they didn’t like my voice, they didn’t’ like my writing … Even the bartending didn’t work.”

Church went through a tumultuous and incredibly challenging few months, beginning in 2017. Church suffered a blood clot, one that was nearly fatal. He was also one of the performers for the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival, taking place September 29 to October 1 that year. The event ended in tragedy, when 60 people were killed, and more than 800 people were injured in a mass shooting. And in 2018, his brother unexpectedly passed away.

The unimaginable sequence of challenges changed everything for Church, including his music.

“The relationship between the artist and the fans, in that moment in time, is sacred,” Church reflects. “And those bullets shattered that. Right after that, I had a health scare, I had a blood clot, and I thought I was gonna die … And then my brother died. So all this happened within a matter of months. I think up until that point, you can listen to music maybe, and you can see that I was brash, arrogant in a lot of ways, but it changes when you have those things happen to you. I think it made the music more humble, and maybe more observant.”

Only a few days after the shooting, Church performed “Why Not Me” at the Grand Ole Opry. He didn’t want to do it, but found it healing, in a way he didn’t anticipate.

“I had a lot of fans die,” Church says. “And I played the Opry right after that, and didn’t want to be there. But I remember, there were a number of fans that had went to the Vegas show that were then going to fly across the country to come to the Opry show, to see me play the Opry.”

“That was a part of their travel and some of them got shot,” he adds. “They died. And I remember being at the Opry that night and… it’s still raw in a lot of ways, but just not something that affects you. And it broke me, in a way.”

Church’s eighth studio album, Evangeline vs. the Machine, will be out on May 2. The record includes his current Top 30 single, “Hands of Time.”

“An album is a snapshot in time that lasts for all time,” Church explains. “I believe in that time-tested tradition of making records that live and breathe as one piece of art – I think it’s important.”

Find Evangeline vs. the Machine and all of Church’s music and upcoming shows at EricChurch.com.

Photo Credit: Robby Klein