💥 BREAKING NEWS: The Raw Honesty of Eric Church Continues to Set Him Apart as Country Music’s Most Unfiltered Voice ⚡ML

Eric Church is in a New Jersey parking lot with his nose inside a glass of bourbon. Before that image sparks any unseemly rumors, let’s look a little closer.

The parking lot is about a hundred feet directly behind the stage of the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, where in a few hours the country music star will be playing a sold-out show on his Outsiders Revival tour. We’re standing on a sectioned-off platform with a super-cool custom bar built inside a rolling road case. Playing quietly behind us is Outsiders Radio, the SiriusXM channel Church says he programs himself. We just heard one of Church’s own songs, in between a Whitney Houston deep cut and the Cars’ “Since You’re Gone.”

As for the bourbon, it’s Church’s newly launched brand, Whiskey JYPSI, and his master distiller and blender Ari Sussman is explaining how to appreciate the spirit’s scent without the alcohol numbing your nasal passages—breathe through your mouth with your snoot inside the glass. “I thought it sounded like bullshit, but it works,” says a grinning Church.Anthony D’Angio

Eric Church performs during the Camden, N.J., stop of his Outsiders Revival tour on Aug. 26, 2023. (Tee by Robert Barakett; jeans by Diesel; styling by Katy Robbins.)

This kind of lesson actually means a lot to the country music star right now. He’s at the kind of complicated crossroads where platinum sellers can find themselves after a while. He’s nine albums deep into a career that’s rung up six solo No. 1 singles, established him as a touring juggernaut, and brought home the 2020 CMA Entertainer of the Year award. There’s even an Eric Church exhibit currently on display at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

But Church is known for his experimentation—his breakthrough hit in 2012 was titled “Springsteen,” which gives a sense of his ambition—and he still has a lot of music left to make. Being taken off the road during the pandemic lockdown also made him think long and hard about his future, above and beyond the songs.

“You kind of know your bread and butter, right?” he says from the crocodile-print seats of a banquette on his tour bus. “I can grab a guitar and go play somewhere and they’re gonna give me more money than they should give me. That was my life. And then Covid, and that was gone. At forty-six, I’m looking at that going, Okay, what does the next ten years look like? How much of that is going to be me walking out playing a certain number of songs versus doing other things?

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“We built a career based on people trusting the brand, the authenticity, whatever,” he continues, using the first-person plural that’s a staple of the Nashville vocabulary. “I don’t know that we did that on purpose. We just did it, and we were able to have this collective thing that we represent musically, something that’s elevated. I think people respect it and that we built something that we could look at expanding beyond music. I thought we could take that trust out for a walk and see what it can do.”

Whiskey JYPSI is the first manifestation of this expansion, but there are more coming. Construction is under way on a small music venue and bar in Nashville’s Lower Broadway district called Chief’s (inspired by Church’s nickname and stage persona), scheduled to open in 2024. And in June, he was announced as one of a group of investors buying a majority stake in the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets from the previous owner—his good friend and golf buddy Michael Jordan.

“It is crazy,” he says, “where the music’s led us.”

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Meantime, though, Church was also feeling like that music needed a reset. He was dissatisfied with his latest outing, the Gather Again tour, which opened in September 2021 during a time of great Covid confusion. “That whole tour was a pain in the ass,” he says. “It was hard every night. We kept having people fall in and out. Different municipalities had different rules. I hate to say it this way, because there were good shows, but it was my least favorite. It didn’t feel like we were back in the spirit of what we did.

“I really had some conversations with myself after that,” he continues. “Our stage sucked. I didn’t like playing in the round—I felt like I was turning my back on the audience every time I went somewhere. I did not have fun, and I came off that going, ‘I don’t know if I really want to keep doing this, and I don’t want to feel like I have to.’ You can tell an artist that has to be there versus wants to be, and I always want to be there.”Anthony D’Angio

Church is nine albums deep into his career and has rung up six solo No. 1 singles.

Then Church was invited by New Orleans dynamo Trombone Shorty to be part of his “Treme Threauxdown” jam session at Jazz Fest. “It was a who’s who, and I was the only country guy, and one of the only white guys,” he says. “I thought we were gonna do a cover, but then they wanted to do our song ‘Cold One,’ with no rehearsal, and it was killer. I walked off the stage and went, ‘Okay, that is what I’m fucking talking about!’ For four minutes of time, we found commonality onstage. So I don’t know where that’s gonna go, but that’s what I’m after.”

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He put together a new configuration of his band, adding three horn players and three Black backup singers for a total of thirteen people onstage. He rolled it out in June for his performance as part of the CMA Fest show at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium—and got slammed for it. “Never been more disappointed by a concert,” tweeted one fan, while another posted, “Eric Church ends very wierd [sic] set and disappoints 50,000 fans.”

“I get it,” says Church with a sigh, “looking back on it. I had a slot. This isn’t my show—I’m playing with seven other artists. And I didn’t play ‘Springsteen,’ I didn’t play a bunch of stuff that they probably thought I would play. But it was good! I don’t care what the blowback was. I watched it, and that set was fucking great.

“Maybe we’re just not made for stuff like that,” he adds. “The last time I played the damn thing, I went out acoustic and played an entire medley that they never could air because I didn’t have any breaks in it. And basically, they told me not to come back again, ever. I was like, I tried to give you something special, and people still talk about that thing. But I was kind of invited not to come back—and they had me back this time, and I guess I blew it again!”Anthony D’Angio

Church on stage in Virginia Beach, Va., on July 1, 2023. (Tee by Robert Barakett; jeans by Diesel; boots by Lucchese.)

But it’s this kind of innovation, from the heavy rock of 2014’s The Outsiders to the introspective singer-songwriter approach of 2015’s Mr. Misunderstood, that’s earned Church such respect from his peers. “He continues to put out stuff that’s completely different, constantly pushing the boundaries of his songwriting or his live show, making these unique experiences for his fans,” says country megastar Luke Combs, describing Church’s approach. “When you come see our show, I want it to be different than the last time you came. And that’s something he does really well.”

On this night, the crowd at PNC in New Jersey is roaring and ready to follow Church wherever he dares to venture. Before launching into the song “Heart on Fire,” he nods to their energy and reassures them that they’ll be rewarded for it. “This is a revival. I will take you there. Your job is to go where I leadeth thee.”

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Church’s sense of creative adventurousness is also what attracted Sussman, formerly the head of spirits development at the Artisan Distilling Program at Michigan State University. “Listening to his catalog, I heard a lot of styles of music,” says Sussman. “There’s references to blues, to bluegrass, soul vibes. And I thought, What might a whiskey be like with Eric Church’s approach to country music? What if there were an artistic way of blending together different whiskey-making traditions, whiskeys from different locations, made in different ways, and weaving them into an American whiskey? The liquid concept was directly inspired by listening to the artist’s music.”

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For their first line, the Legacy Batch, that meant blending different whiskey categories together from various origins—combining Canadian whisky, bourbon whiskey, malt whiskey—instead of blending the grains before fermentation. It’s something Sussman says hasn’t been done before.

It also isn’t the usual celebrity path of doing a licensing deal with a liquor company and slapping your name on the label—in fact, Church was insistent that his name not appear on the Whiskey JYPSI bottle or branding. “In some ways, this is an anti-celebrity brand,” says Sussman. “The intention was to be creative and have fun. It’s not about flipping it for George Clooney money.” (Sussman also acknowledges that there was internal discussion about the name, which is taken from a Church lyric, concerning the fact that the word gypsy is sometimes considered a slur; he points to songs by Bob Dylan and Van Morrison to illustrate that the term is “an elevated level of existence within that sort of musical context” and also adds that “I’m Jewish—I have personal sensitivity to the use of words that can lead to gas chambers.”)Courtesy of The Brand Hotel

Church (middle) on a visit to the Whiskey JYPSI distillery earlier this year with business partner and friend Raj Alva (left) and whiskey maker Ari Sussman.

Church is taking a similarly unconventional approach to Chief’s, which he wants to stand out on a strip that already has numerous bars backed by stars from Luke Bryan to Miranda Lambert to Kid Rock. “I saw Springsteen on Broadway,” he says, “and one of my favorite lines was when he called himself a fraud—he talked about all the stuff he sings about and he said, ‘You know what? I’m a fraud. I never did any of that.’ I thought that was one of the most rock ’n’ roll moments I’ve ever seen. It floored me. Jaw dropped. As a fan, when would I ever get to hear that, unless I’m sitting on his bus?

“So that was when I thought, What if we did a venue in Nashville where I could do a show with that same kind of raw honesty? There’s going to be a lot of songs that nobody’s heard, there’s gonna be some stuff unique for that place. We’ll talk about Vegas [the 2017 massacre at the Route 91 Harvest music festival], talk about the loss of my brother, talk about almost dying—there’s a period in my life where I had some shit going on and I didn’t really address it. This would be a great place to do something like that— very intimate, 450 seats—and do three shows a week for a couple months, kind of Broadway style.”