Eric Church Reveals New Song ‘Jenny’ From Album ‘That Almost Killed Me’
Eric Church shared new music from an album that tested his physical and mental limits. The singer performed "Jenny" at the end of the keynote address at CRS on Thursday (Feb. 20) in Nashville. He also explained how this new album came together.
Wearing a scarf, sweater and sensible glasses, a remarkably affable Church answered Country Countdown USA's Lon Helton's questions with candor. The interview told the story of his career through a theme of "Chasing Creativity." At the end, they got to the music he's working on, which was all written and recorded last month in a makeshift studio in the North Carolina mountains.
"I’m very proud of it and it was my favorite time looking back on it, not going through it," Church says. "But looking back on what came out of it, it was exactly what had to happen."
Church turned an old restaurant he frequents in the summer into a recording studio and set a challenge of writing and recording one new song every day for 28 straight days. There were days he didn't sleep, he admits, but by pushing himself to the limits, he found the creativity he was searching for.
"Too many times with stuff like that you get a pile of songs and then you play it for who your people are and they tell you what they think and then the producer gets to think," Church says. "By the time you get to the cutting process you’ve been through all this s--t … Music was meant to be — when it's born as a songwriter, when it’s born in the room, that song is born. And too many times we try to record six months later."
It's unlikely all 28 songs will make his next studio album. In fact, he conceded it's possible all 28 weren't any good, but the process worked, and that's what he's proud of.
"Everybody needed to be uncomfortable. The producer, the band — they didn’t know where they were being shipped off to. The writers — I brought in co-writers that had no clue what they were in for.”
"Jenny" is the new song Church shared at the very end of his panel at Country Radio Seminar. He performed with just an acoustic guitar after explaining that the love song was inspired by a broken generator. Everyone kept running around saying how they needed to fix the "Jenny." That stuck with him, and he turned it into a folky, '70s-rock sounding country song.
"Come on Jenny, let's go Jenny / See if this Chevy rocks / To me Jenny, you're old Jenny / Ain't just another Jenny from the block / Let's take it nice and slow / Come on, Jenny, let's go," he sings.
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