What do you do following the release of your most critically-acclaimed album, your most lauded tour where you, literally, almost killed yourself to complete the two-set-a-night-with-no-opener run? If you’re Eric Church, you come back with Desperate Man, the weirdest, most contentious and thoroughly unexpected collection of your career.
One of the most singular working artists in any genre, Church has managed to do in Nashville what few others would even attempt: shrug off country radio. Station EPs remain the gatekeeper in the format more than anywhere else in music in 2018, but you’ll never catch Church cowing to airwave trends. Case in point: “Desperate Man,” the title track and lead single for this LP which arrived bursting with Latin drums and a “Sympathy for the Devil”-esque barroom piano—something exactly zero of the remaining cuts in the Airplay Top 40 boast. And in an era where saccharine sweet messages that fit titles like Florida Georgia Line’s “Simple” and Luke Bryan’s “Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset” win biggest, Church dares to spit, “Yeah, I’m a half-cock, full-tilt, scarred-hands-to the hilt/Don’t-push-me grown-ass man.”
Or, consider the rollout for Mr. Misunderstood, Church’s excellent 2015 collection. Members of the 41-year-old's fan club (appropriately dubbed The Church Choir) received physical vinyl copies that November morning without warning while radio staffers and media members scrambled to find the set on iTunes. “If you want to know where the music industry is broken it’s this,” Church said following the unique delivery, “when we’re going to put out an album, the people we’re trying to get it in the hands of are the fans’, but [they] are also the last people to have a chance at it…I think that’s so ass backwards. So we went to the fans first.”
Radio embraces him anyway. Church has logged 7 airplay No.1’s during his career, and across Desperate Man’s 11 cuts, there’s plenty fare that could do well on the charts if he chooses to put it forward. The slow-rolling “Hippie Radio,” itself a love letter to the FM dial in his daddy’s old Pontiac, begs for a windows-down, open-road drive. The soulful, pared-down “Heart Like a Wheel” sticks with a melody thick as molasses. “Some Of It,” an open-hearted look at life’s hard-won lessons, is as easy as easy-listening comes.
But the rest of what makes up Man, is far more challenging—and that’s a good thing, for Church and his fans. (Anyone whose been to any one of his sold out arena shows knows that his crowd is there for the knotty deep cuts more than the massive hits.) On the foreboding album-opener, “The Snake,” Church hisses at a toxic political regime. “Rattlesnake, copperhead,” he sings, “Either one of them, kill you dead/We stay hungry, they get fed.” And “Monsters” sees Church falling to his knees in prayer in the face of real world evil, something the singer experienced firsthand last year as he headlined the Friday evening of Las Vegas’ Route 91 Festival. Just two nights later, during the Sunday evening session, a shooter killed 58 fans and injured hundreds more. Church has called for common sense gun reform in the months since.
On slow-building “Solid,” he shakes his head at intolerance—"Everybody wants me to think like they do, put my faith in something new,” he sings—and “Drowning Man,” the final song on the LP, finds Church holed up in a bar, cursing the lies of the American dream and scoffing at those donning rose colored glasses in world up in flames. “Bartender, if you’re with me, pour some whiskey on this drowning man,” he pleads.
Much like the time it releases into, Man is heavy and even bizarre, but it's never without hope. The Chief even offers his own tried-and-true salve on the knowing “Jukebox And A Bar” near the end of the set. Over an ocean of reverb, he sings, “There’s no better prescription for the human condition/Than a jukebox and a bar.”
Amen.
