The fan club exclusive & album is a six-song EP with repeating themes. A decade ago, he leaned into the that same concept with, "Funny how a melody sounds like a memory." “I need a melody without a memory,” he sings toward the end. An astute fan may notice he tips a cap to his hit song "Springsteen" during "Russian Roulette."
Spotlight songs on Heart include "Heart on Fire" (a wide-open, Mellencamp-inspired road anthem that screams freedom), the tender and easy-to-love "Never Break Heart" and his snarling lead single, "Stick That in Your Country Song." "Crazyland" is a masterful lyric that finds Church, Luke Laird and Micheal Heeney literally personifying the many sides of heartbreak, but it's lost ahead of "Bunch of Nothing," a romping blues-rock cut that repeats this theme one too many times.Ĭhurch spends quite a bit of time running early on (the first five songs feature a car, truck or beaten dashboard), and that brands the entire disc, perhaps even cleaving it from the remaining two-thirds. "Yeah, my true north is anywhere I can leave it all behind / Let’s point this thing west into the chest of the still beating heart of the night," he hollers, pleading with someone to join him. "Russian Roulette," "Crazyland" and "Bunch of Nothing" are the lyrical core of Heart, each bringing different takes on heartbreak and the trauma associated. Add the piano and acoustic guitar theater of "Heart of the Night" for something of an emotional prequel - you can palpably feel Church teetering on an edge here, longing for a freedom his father never knew, but afraid of the isolation that comes with it. A distinct anxiety ties the nine songs together, with tracks like "Stick That in Your Country Song" and "Never Break Heart" bringing relief. Heart & Soul is Church's first new music since 2018's Desperate Man.Broken Heart would be a more appropriate title for the first of Church's three new albums, even as it offers a few moments of pristine hope. The middle disc will only be available to members of Church's fan club, the Church Choir. "But it was just a special, special time, and a special, special project that I think will be among our best."Įach of Heart & Soul's three discs is set for release on a different day: Heart is due out on April 16, & will arrive on April 20, and Soul will conclude the project on April 23. "I am the hardest critic on making sure every song deserves to be on the record, and I beat this thing to death going, 'This can't be that good,'" he adds. Is this a double album? And if it's a double album, how do we leave out these five or six songs?'. "I kept saying, 'God, this is going to be really hard.
"The interesting thing about this process is that Jay kept asking me the last three or four days, 'Are we done?'" Church reveals. Early on, instead, he simply aimed to make sure that every song was the best it could possibly be. "For me, it just kinda happened the way it was supposed to happen."Ĭhurch's focus was so on the music-making format, however, that that the idea for a triple album idea came later.
I was not," Church shared backstage at the 2020 CMA Awards, during which he was crowned Entertainer of the Year. "If you listen to the songs and you hear what the songs are, you very easily go, 'This sounds like they were in the middle of quarantine.' But we weren't. The 24-song project came out of the star's marathon recording session in early 2020, which found Church, producer Jay Joyce and a crew of songwriters and musicians writing and recording one song each day in a former restaurant they turned into a recording studio for the occasion.
"Lynyrd Skynyrd Jones" closes the Soul disc of Church's forthcoming triple album, Heart & Soul.
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