Truth is, there’s no shame in winning on the same terms as everyone else. This is a man lashing out at a thing he can’t control, not a man remaking that thing from within: a curmudgeon, not an outlaw. Instead, he tenaciously follows his arrow, putting an eight-minute track on his album, “Devil, Devil (Prelude: Prince of Darkness).” But he wastes roughly the first half on a bitter whispered soliloquy that includes the actual line “The Devil walks among us folks/And Nashville is his bride.” Sometimes he misfires, as on the growling conclusion of “Dark Side,” where he threatens unspecified “thugs and ugly mugs dealing drugs and making noise/You can kill each other all you want/But if you touch my little boy.” It’s reminiscent of “Homeboy,” one of his most meanspirited hits, and the one that most clearly paints him as a man who watches the world go by, complaining rather than engaging with it. That’s the case on “Talladega”: basically a rewrite of his hit “Springsteen,” but about enduring love for friends, not enduring romantic love. He knows when to dial himself back, and when to be tender above all else. He’s a singer of rough attitude, but his voice can move gently. (He has a writing credit on every song on this album.) “A Man Who Was Gonna Die Young” is a restrained, exhausted and relieved assessment of one’s own mortality: “Fear, I’ve had none, what the hell made you wanna love/A man who was gonna die young?” And “Like a Wrecking Ball” takes the tragic tour life song to its ideal end: the happy, sex-filled homecoming. Church is nothing if not a wise songwriter.
Both of these songs double as meta-commentaries on how clichés can leave a songwriter cold.Īnd Mr. And “Give Me Back My Hometown” is lustrous, a song about knowing a place inside and out, but only because you’ve made memories there with the person you loved, who’s now gone. He does that effectively on “Cold One”: a song about a beer that turns into a song about being blown off by someone you care about, who also happens to take your beer.
#Eric church the outsiders how to
One argument in his favor, though: He knows how to tip his beat-up ball cap to the road most traveled and then peel off onto a back alley.
Church sings these sorts of songs with more authority, or more vision, than his contemporaries - in essence, whether he’s allowed to get away with it, whether he’s somehow earned the right. And, more damning, he’s capable of delivering a negligible song - say, “Roller Coaster Ride,” or “Broke Record,” apart from where he sleazily intones, “You keep yank, yank, yanking my string, string, baby” - as any of the peers he would like you to think he disdains.Īnd so the more pedestrian half of this album effectively tests whether Mr. Which is to say that Eric Church is a conservative, an old-school values guy passing for rebellious in neutered times.
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