Eric Church is like Keith Urban with a 20-a-day habit and a stick of gum on the go all the time.
The Chief returns with another single from 2015’s Mr Misunderstood. I remember seeing him for the first time at the Greenwich Arena in London, where he had the flu. Eric with the flu is better than [Insert Least Favorite Act] without flu, and he tore through his greatest hits and latest jams.
Kill A Word, Record Year and the title track have all done very well, so if this is the final single it’s a good choice. Written with Jeff Hyde and Luke Dick, the team that brought you Kill a Word, it’s an Eric Church song where Eric is thinking and drinking ‘till my down goes up’.
Poor Eric, ‘a parking lot down-and-outer’, has lost his girl. Her mum taught him but ‘her dad was hellbent on saving me’. From what? Is she a no-goodnik? Anyhow, the girl is long gone and he’s still ‘never been east of Dallas’, stuck in his quotidian life at Scottie’s, where he can drink two beers for the price of one. I love the lyric ‘no gas in his neon light’, painting great pictures.
The arrangement of the song follows the tone heard on Record Year: a steady start in the verses with echo on the vocal, before an electric guitar comes in for the chorus, which sticks mainly on the D and G chords. The solo, full of treble, is a perfect soundtrack to others in bars like Scottie’s drinking till 2am. The harmonies in the final choruses are excellent.
Eric turned forty this month (belated greetings, Chief!), making him a contemporary of Luke Bryan, Jason Isbell and Brad Paisley. Time will tell which of those four will have made the most pivotal contribution to the genre, but Eric is well on his way to becoming one of the top Modern Outlaws along with Isbell, Sturgill and Stapleton, who between them are leading the fight for the 'East Nashville' sound.
7 out of 10
Editor's note: I don't do much editing because I'm lazy anyway, but like Robert Dean, I'm mostly gonna let ol' Jonny rip. He's got his own loopy way of saying things… and there's also the "language gap" since he's from across the pond. We'll all get used to him soon.
