Eric Church Defends Polarizing Gospel Performance at Stagecoach

Eric Church isn’t backing down after his Stagecoach performance earned mixed reviews.

“This was the most difficult set I have ever attempted,” Church, 46, said in a statement released after his divisive headlining set at the music festival on Friday, April 26. Instead of an energetic performance of his Top 40 hits, Church took it down a notch by performing an acoustic set of hymns and gospel country covers. The unplugged concert “sent festival goers for the exit,” according to the Desert Sun, but Church was unrepentant.

“I’ve always found that taking it back to where it started, back to chasing who Bob Seger loves, who [Bruce] Springsteen loves, who Willie Nelson loves, you chase it back to the origin,” he said. “The origin of all that is still the purest form of it. And we don’t do that as much anymore. It felt good at this moment to go back, take a choir and do that.”

Church added that, for him, there has always been “something with records, with performances, I’ve always been the one that’s like, ‘Let’s do something really, really strange and weird and take a chance.’”

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“Sometimes it doesn’t work, but it’s OK if you’re living on that edge, because that edge, that cutting edge, is where all the new guys are going to gravitate to anyway,” he continued. “So if you can always challenge yourself that way, it always cuts sharper than any other edge.”

Church’s set opened with an organist playing some intro music. Church came out and sat on a stool in front of a series of red stained glass windows on the production screen. He then opened things up with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” From there, he performed a series of hymns – “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “I’ll Fly Away” – with help from a 16-person choir.

While Church did perform a handful of his songs (“Mistress Named Music,” “Sinners Like Me,” “Desperate Man,” “The Outsiders”), he spent the majority of his set covering artists like Hank Williams (“I Saw The Light”), Marc Cohn (“Walking In Memphis”), Neil Diamond (“I Am.. I Said”) Al Green (“Take Me to the River”) and The Pointer Sisters (“Fire”). The set also included gospelized versions of 2pac’s “California Love” and Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice.”

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This was Church’s fifth time headlining Stagecoach and his seventh time playing the festival overall. At the end of the set, Church’s full band joined in for “Country Music Jesus” and “Springsteen.” However, by that point, many fans had walked out. Some wrote on social media that this was a “revival in the desert” while applauding Church’s decision. Others said that Church doing covers while on a stool “isn’t what we came for.”

Alongside his statement, Church’s record label said the set was “an attempt to take the crowd back to the foundation of where it started for him musically.”