I would have guessed that an Eric Church concert was one of the few places in the Twin Cities I wouldn’t wind up in a conversation about mutual aid efforts. I would have guessed wrong.
Church is, as mainstream country stars go, politically unobjectionable. You’re never gonna mistake him for Jason Isbell, but he’s not a kneejerk MAGA yahoo like Jason Aldean either. He’s not even a lightweight slur-spouting redneck like Morgan Wallen, though they’re buddies and Wallen opened for Church at U.S. Bank Stadium in 2022.
Yeah, Church is football-stadium big, popular enough to easily sell out St. Paul’s Grand Casino Arena (that name still doesn’t sound right) on a Saturday night. A North Carolina boy with a bit of a maverick reputation, by Nashville standards, Church played too long while opening for Rascal Flatts in 2006 and lost his support slot to some kid named Taylor. He got a Covid shot for the cover of Billboard and he’s called for gun control. He prizes his artistic autonomy.
And Trump? Church has criticized the prez for his “racial overtones” and called his tweeting “unpresidential”—not exactly antifa agitprop but enough to lose a fan or 10. “We’re a country of immigrants, and we always should be,” he told Rolling Stone in 2018, declaring, “You never separate kids from their families. Never, ever, ever.” Mark him down as about as confused as the median American voter.
For all Church’s humane sentiments about immigration, I did not expect him to mention Homeland Security’s occupation of Minnesota from the GCA stage—and he didn’t. When he did obliquely reference what he’d seen on TV (never the best way to keep track of what’s happening in the world), he fell back on “It’s not about what divides us; it’s about what unites us.” Then he launched into “Kill a Word”—”If it were up to me to change/I'd turn ‘lies’ and ‘hate’ to ‘love’ and ‘truth.’” Senator Klobuchar, if you’re looking for a running mate…
“Kind of a cop out, huh?” a woman behind me leaned over to say, a little unexpectedly. I later learned that the family in that row lived up the road on Cathedral Hill. Not your typical Eric Church fan, you might say, but I’ve talked to enough fans of enough artists over the years to know you never can generalize. The son was diehard enough that he rattled off a list of songs he just had to hear.
I’m pretty sure he heard them all—Church played 30 songs over two-and-a-half hours. He ran though his latest (and least commercially successful) album, Evangeline vs. the Machine, front to back. Folks may have streamed off for beer and bathrooms during his cover of Tom Waits’s “Clap Hands,” but Church himself was fervid, going into a fierce soul clap at the close of the number. Hell, he even tackled the Ike and Tina version of “Proud Mary,” handing vocal duties off to his backup singers. He put on one hell of a show.
Still, my neighbors and I drifted into one of those talks we’ve all had with just about everyone we meet these days—about how much ICE action is in your neighborhood, about the feeling that you’re being watched when you do a diaper run for your vulnerable neighbors. We all winced together later in the night when Church (good-naturedly, but still) imitated a Somali cab driver.
Was it unfair of us to expect Church to acknowledge that our state was under attack? Were we fools to even suspect he was on “our side”? It would be unthinkable for a performer to show up in a town and not mention a natural disaster, or a school shooting, or some other local catastrophe that had dominated the news, after all. What was different here?
“I know how you feel about me and you know how I feel about you,” he said cryptically, as though alluding to something unmentioned. “Tonight is all about the music.”
My neighbors and I shrugged.
And there was a lot of music, beginning with an extended overture of Pink Floyd songs that prominently featured “Time” and “Welcome to the Machine,” two very Church-y themes. We’d sat through 20 minutes of a planetarium-worthy light show before the man himself strode out onstage in a snug jean jacket and his trademark shades.
Church had a huge band behind him—a string section, a horn section, nine backup singers, two dozen people onstage all together. This was almost certainly the only arena country show I’ll see all year with a French horn player. And the arrangements from Evangeline vs. the Machine, reproduced live, were lush and textured.
Later in the night, Church said he wanted to make a record like the ones he obsessed over in his youth. “When I grew up, music was the most important thing in my life,” he told us, grumbling that in the age of phones and tablets, his kids only listened to music in the background.
But this obsession with music for music’s sake has reduced Church’s songwriting techniques to tics. On Evangeline, he leans on one of his worst habits as a songwriter: Referencing songs that are better than the ones he’s singing. His opener, “Hands of Time” lists all the tunes he turns to for rejuvenation, from Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” to Tom Petty’s “Even the Losers” to Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights.”
Church has always been a music nerd’s country star. On “Record Year,” from 2015, he sang about spinning vinyl at home after a breakup instead of heading to the bar. On “Mr. Misunderstood,” from the same album, he declares that “Jeff Tweedy is one bad mother.” Both songs sounded great on Saturday night.
So did his best-by-far song about songs, “Springsteen.” With its Roy Bittan-style keys and full-throated “whoa whoa oh oh oh” chorus, it’s nearly the Platonic ideal of an arena singalong, referring back to Bruce as a memory of youth, unlocking the Proustian nature of popular music. If it sidesteps much of what the Boss was singing about and drains the particulars from his music, which is about much more than thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore… well, let’s set that aside for now.
But I’ll stand my ground when it comes to a newer composition. On “Johnny,” Church addresses the Satan-thwarting fiddle player in Charlie Daniels’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” lamenting that “Machines control the people, and the people shoot the kids.” I don’t disagree with either statement, but ingrate that I am, I want Church to fill in the blanks. Who’s the devil here? Who controls the machine? When, on the Evangeline song “Bleed on Paper,” he swears that he won’t chase trends or lucre and will only sing about what matters to him, I gotta wonder: Well, what matters then?
It’s telling that when the snarling rocker “Stick That In Your Country Song” criticizes the blandness of most commercial country music it also fretfully IDs cities as places of crime and failure, rather than places that more people consider home than Church’s beloved small towns (where crime and failure are hardly unknown). And I’ve never been comfortable with “Homeboy,” about a small-town kid with gold fronts “running these dirty old streets” who needs to “come on home, boy.” An adult man as well-traveled as Church should know better by now.
Church played both of those songs as part of an oldies set that comprised the latter two-thirds of his show, revealing the depth of his songbook. From “Desperate Man” and its “Sympathy for the Devil” feel through the easy-rocking “Drink in My Hand,” a lot of this is what we’d have called heartland rock in the ’80s.
Church was ahead of the curve on the pro-weed tip with “Smoke a Little Smoke.” He has forlorn singalongs like “Round Here Buzz” and dare-to-love invitations like “Hell of a View.” He summed up his persona—the repentant but unchastened badass—on “Sinners Like Me.” Later in the set, he stripped down to his core band and dug into a real rockin’ bluegrass-style rave up on “Cold One.”
But maybe none of it hit as hard as the short acoustic set Church performed with backup singer Joanna Cotten. They started with “Mixed Drinks About Feelings,” which Church originally recorded with Susan Tedeschi, then followed up June and Johnny’s “Jackson" with Springsteen’s “Atlantic City,” the comedy of the former repeating itself as tragedy in the latter.
“When he plays ‘Pledge Allegiance to the Hag,’ this place is gonna go nuts,” a guy in my row warned me enthusiastically. And he was right. It was a good ol’ rockin’ honky-tonk number that gave Church’s sidemen a moment to shine, an effort that Hag would have surely saluted.
But looking at Church’s performance throughout the night, I’m not so sure Merle woulda done it that way. Haggard’s politics were not always consistent, but whether singing a jingoist flag-waver like “The Fighting Side of Me” or “Irma Jackson,” about a doomed interracial couple, you knew where he stood.
And I had similar thoughts during "Springsteen," and again when Church sang “Atlantic City.” He surely knew that Bruce had been in Minneapolis just two weeks ago to sing his anti-ICE protest anthem, “The Streets of Minneapolis.” What did he make of it?
Church actually attended the Springsteen show in Manchester when the Boss went off on his much-quoted speech against Trump, declaring “the America I love, the America I've written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.” Church defended the singer, “Bruce, he’s earned the right to say and do what he wants”—not the most ringing endorsement of First Amendment rights.
The day after Border Patrol goons executed Alex Pretti, the great country music journalist Marissa Moss asked the question: “A Nurse Who Served Veterans Was Killed. Where You At, Country Music?" She wasn’t expecting much—“I am not stunned by the silence,” she wrote—but she still felt the need to call out the hypocrisy of certain country loudmouths. For instance, “Chris Janson, who never misses a chance to post about ‘American heroes’ and the work he's doing for veterans, posted a series of photos of himself in a hot tub yesterday,” Moss noted.
No one would lump Church in with dingbats like Janson or John Rich. If anything, he probably gravitates toward the kind of kneejerk libertarianism that’s the truest political creed in the U.S., and has long outworn its welcome. Even when leavened with a dose of compassionate humanism, “Don’t tell me what to do” is a limited world view, and silence is silence. Church wants to assume the aura of integrity without the risk it requires.
Which doesn't mean a lot of what he sang Saturday night couldn't hit home. My favorite Church song remains “Give Me Back My Hometown,” and here’s what I wrote about It when it was released in 2014:
There's an ornery dissatisfaction at the core of Church's innovation, and it takes a power ballad to put it across. “Give Me Back My Hometown” covers familiar lyrical ground: An ex-lover’s memory haunts those places the singer once thought his. But as the music swells, Church seemingly voices a larger, shared sense of loss, that free-floating 21st century American suspicion that someone, though we can't agree who, has swindled us out of what we deserve.
I don’t know what anyone else heard in that song Saturday night. Probably most remembered a lost love, whether recent or long ago. Maybe some, consciously or not, thought of the companies shipping jobs away from where they lived. Maybe some even shared the MAGA fever-dream of immigrants getting what they don’t deserve.
But me, I thought of the federal thugs treating my city like a dumpster, brutalizing its residents, choking its streets with tear gas, and about how someday we’ll take it back from them. Thing is, I suppose, when a singer is “just about the music,” you can wrench his songs into meaning whatever you want them to.
Setlist
Hands of Time
Bleed on Paper
Johnny
Storm in Their Blood
Darkest Hour
Evangeline
Rocket's White Lincoln
Clap Hands (Tom Waits cover)
Desperate Man
Stick That in Your Country Song
Smoke a Little Smoke
Homeboy
Kill a Word
Give Me Back My Hometown
Creepin'
Sinners Like Me
Mr. Misunderstood
Hell of a View
Springsteen
Drink in My Hand
Record Year
Cold One
Round Here Buzz
Pledge Allegiance to the Hag
Holdin' My Own
Mixed Drinks About Feelings
Jackson (June & Johnny Cash cover)
Atlantic City (Bruce Springsteen cover)
These Boots
Through My Ray-Bans
