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“I've always believed that the moment a song is born is the most important moment of that song's life,” Eric Church tells Apple Music. “And what normally happen, 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.” That <i>isn't</i> what happened with <i>Heart & Soul</i>, a trio of new albums Church wrote and recorded with his band and team of co-writers over the course of a single month at a shuttered-for-the-season restaurant in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountain. “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,’” he recall. “And he goe, 'Man, we're kicking a. If it's not broke—' And I stopped him, I said, 'You break it. We have to mess this up.'” It was then that he and his producer, Jay Joyce, decided to follow that instinct. “Let's write the song that day,” he say, thinking back to their first conversations about <i>Heart & Soul</i>. “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 favorite project for that reason, because I've never really put it all out there like we've done on this one.” Though they’re three separate album, Church views the 24 total tracks as a cohesive body of work, all written and recorded in the same place. “Every night, I would stay up most of the night writing song,” he say. “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,” he say. “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.” .

via Apple Music

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