Soul

I’ve always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song’s life. And what normally happens, at least in Nashville, is a song is born, and we write the song, and we go home and we make a demo. And six months later, we figure out if we’re going to go into a studio and cut that song. But there’s so much time that the magic just starts to die away.

I remember having a conversation with my bass player, and I said, ‘Listen, I’m going to bring in some different players on this album.’, and he goes, ‘Man, we’re kicking ass. If it’s not broke—’ And I stopped him, I said, ‘You break it. We have to mess this up.’

Let’s write the song that day. Let’s record the song that day. And let’s commit everything we have to that moment, to that song, and let it be. This is my favourite project for that reason, because I’ve never really put it all out there like we’ve done on this one.

Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing songs. We’d finish them by two or three o'clock in the afternoon, and then we’d go in the studio and we’d record them. And it also put pressure on me: I’m not going to walk in there with anything that I’m not proud of. I wanted to make sure I walked in with a stud of a song and I would work harder.

Soon, Church was writing songs in his sleep and letting the inspiration take him and his collaborators where the music flowed. “I got to where I could not turn it off. Everything was a song to me. I mean, anybody that talked to me, I would go, ‘I can make that a song.’ I don’t know if that’s good or bad; I got quite manic, but it worked. At the end of it, it took me a while to shut it down.

If you look at our career, it’s pretty easy to see our first single off of every album has been aggressive. “Stick That in Your Country Song”, that’s aggressive, but the next one’s normally a pretty big hit. I know that’s my best chance.

—via Apple Music