Eric Church Turns a Corner in His CareerWhen Eric Church ended up at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with new album
Chief, the reaction varied from euphoria to confusion.
Church and Capitol Nashville were ecstatic: First-week sales of 145,000 units, according to Nielsen SoundScan, exceeded the 125,000 Capitol had as its best-case scenario, and it was well past the 75,000 sales Church expected. Many in the country music business scratched their head over the prospects of having an artist who had never peaked higher than No. 10 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs (“Love Your Love the Most” and “Hell on the Heart” both hit that mark in 2009) top the all-genre albums chart. And plenty of non-country executives were likely hearing Church’s name for the first time.
In the process, Church became the first country artist to reach the Billboard 200 summit without a No. 1 country hit since Tim McGraw’s “Not a Moment Too Soon” achieved that distinction in 1994. But McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl” was a top five single at the time. Church is thus the only country artist in the SoundScan era to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 without ever having a top five country song.
“Everywhere I go people keep running me down saying it’s the beginning of the new model—you don’t need radio anymore,” Capitol/EMI Nashville president Mike Dungan says. “But that’s way, way, way overstated. There’s no question that this artist has come at it from a slightly different angle. Most artists go right to the hardcore [country] fans, the P1 fans, and those first buys usually come from the hardcore fans.
“Eric, I think, kind of built it from the outside in. He kind of went to the sometimes-country-fans fringe and then as time has elapsed, his career and he have come to the center, and we’re finally in that place where we’re grabbing onto some of those P1 fans.”
If there’s a new model in place, it’s represented less by the lack of radio participation in Church’s success than by the hit-or-miss nature of broadcasters’ response. Airplay for the new album’s first single, “Homeboy,” has been intense in some markets while numerous large stations have yet to play it even once. As a result, the song is lodged at No. 15 on Hot Country Songs after so far peaking at No. 13. Despite that moderate chart performance, it was certified gold on July 25 for 500,000 digital downloads, signifying a strong listener reaction.
And, judging from the debut-week performance of
Chief, the “Homeboy” sales were a strong gauge of interest in the album.
“We left our mark with a lot of fans out there, made an impression—either with the record or the live performance—and they were waiting on the CD to come out even more than I thought,” Church says. “It restored my faith in what we do and the people, because we’ve done it differently. This is not the conventional model by any means.”
Maybe not the conventional current model, but a lot of what Church has created is grounded in old-school ways. Church and producer Jay Joyce assembled Chief—as they have his previous two albums,
Sinners Like Me and
Carolina—as a full-album experience instead of simply collecting a bunch of potential
singles. Church toured incessantly to build a fan base, and Capitol hung in there with the Church/Joyce combination, showing some faith in the artist-development process.
“They let us develop,” Joyce says. “I’ve got to hand it to them. Of course they were involved, but I think they [figured] we hadn’t hung ourselves yet, so they let us do what we wanted to do.”
A key point in that development came with “Smoke a Little Smoke,” released as the third single from
Carolina in June 2010. Its quirky, rhythmic texture stood out against other country product and became his first gold single in May. It also became an inspiration for
Chief, which extends the layered, multirhythmic production at the heart of “Smoke.”
“A lot of industry and radio people thought I lost my mind putting that song out,” Church recalls. “I just knew what I saw live with what the crowd did. It became my biggest song, and
Carolina went gold. It had a different feel, it felt live. I knew when I made this record I wanted it to [set the direction].
“In Nashville, a lot of times we let fear dictate the process. We’re scared it won’t be a hit, we’re scared the label won’t like it, we’re scared the vocal won’t sound great. When we made this record, we weren’t scared because of ‘Smoke.’ We felt pretty vindicated, it released the harnesses—let’s get creative and let the creativity flow.”
Flow it did. Church threw in a pitch-alteration technique in the opening song “Creepin’” borrowed directly from David Bowie’s “Fame”—an admittedly left-field influence for a country project.
But some of the other creative decisions are pulled from country’s past. The album employs only a handful of Nashville’s usual session musicians, instead giving the bulk of the work to Church’s road band. In fact, drummer Craig Wright and bassist Lee Hendricks are responsible for every note of the album’s foundation, and Church plays a heavier role in the album’s guitar makeup, creating an earthier, more natural feel.
“He knows when he’s going to lay into the vocal harder, so he naturally plays the guitar different there,” Joyce says, “and it’s all coming from the same mind.”
And some of Church’s vocals are taken directly from the original tracking sessions instead of from overdubbed performances.
“I love the interaction as an artist with myself and the guitar players and Jay, who’s playing live in the room a lot with melody lines,” Church says. “We didn’t plan them. It’s just like you’re onstage—one person is picking up on a rhythm and what’s going on [in that moment]. I credit Jay for letting that process develop and the way he runs the studio.”
The No. 1 album could be a game-changer for Church’s career. Dungan was cautiously optimistic that the sales results will inspire some of those stillreticent radio stations to add “Homeboy” to their playlists. As a result, Dungan declined to name the next single, though he believes the climate for that release has changed dramatically.
“I can comfortably project that our next single will be a No. 1 single at radio, which will be massive for him, because we haven’t had anything near that so far,” Dungan predicts. “And then we’ll follow it up with another No. 1. I feel very comfortable with that.”
Church is less specific about how he plans to capitalize on the first-week sales for
Chief. Instead, he prefers to let his audience dictate the future.
“The record’s doing its own thing now, it has its own life,” he says. “We’re going to go and keep playing the shows and see where the people take us. They took us to 145,000 the first week. I never saw that coming—nobody did. The power is in their hands. It’s their record now. I’m excited to see where we go.”
Source:
Billboard Country Update----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Define Hit: Eric ChurchRegarding “Country radio” as a singular, monolithic being is wrong on most counts, but certainly when looking at Eric Church’s
“Homeboy” (No. 13 Mediabase) and his new album
Chief (145,000 copies sold). “Way too much has been made about Eric having not had a hit,” Capitol/EMI President/CEO Mike Dungan tells Country Aircheck. “Yeah the song is only in the teens, but we do have a lot of markets that have given it tons of airplay. And there are a lot of markets where Eric as an artist has seen tons of play for a long time.”
Church’s unexpected first-week numbers – “we were aggressively thinking 125,000,” Dungan admits – can’t diminish a monster reaction single and hit by any definition. Single downloads, video and internet response and a high sales-per-spin ratio tipped the label off almost immediately. “It didn’t take but a couple of listens for people to wake up and say, ‘I want to have that song,’” he says.
As for the lack of a chart consensus on “Homeboy,” Dungan says, “The major Cumulus stations are still not on this record. We’re still selling in Indy (WFMS) and Dallas (KPLX), but not nearly at the ratio we’re experiencing in other areas.”
Cumulus’ SVP/Programming Jan Jeffries tells Country Aircheck the song is “getting airplay in nights on Cody Alan’s show on all Cumulus stations. We are watching requests and examining research in those markets ... It has leveled for the past three or four weeks halfway up the list. However, we recognize the value of the record and are keeping it in consideration.”
Chief’s all-genre No. 1 debut has also dispelled a notion that has stood since Church’s debut album
Sinners Like Me earned him a rep for making “guy records” that might not play as well in a female-leaning format. “I don’t know about that,” Dungan argues. “The males are always out there, but every once in a while they raise their heads and go, ‘Hell yeah!’”
He calls the sophomore album
Carolina “a nod to the relationship. Now he’s back to the male themes, but formatically it fits better. Part of that is an evolution in the sound of Eric Church, and part of it is the evolution of Country radio and where it’s come with Jason Aldean and other things that have pushed the envelope. The format is closer to Eric Church than it was two albums ago.”
On deck for EMI Nashville is the follow-up single “Drink In My Hand,” which will be followed by “Springsteen.” Dungan calls the former “our first real shot at a slam-dunk No. 1 with Eric.”
Source:
Country Aircheck
