by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a two-year-old Austin City Limits from the DVD backlog featuring country singer Eric
Church, whom I had mixed feelings about: I basically liked him but as the show
progressed I started to get worn down by the sameness of his material. Musically he’s able to ring a lot of changes on the basic
1970’s Southern-rock style that’s become the default setting for today’s
“country” music (especially for male artists) — including one beautiful song,
“Put a Drink in My Hand,” which began with a shiveringly beautiful blues-style
slide guitar intro from one of his two lead guitarists. (Church himself
occasionally plays electric guitar but usually plays acoustic rhythm parts the
way Elvis did in the early days.) One expects to hear a pedal steel guitar in
country music but not a
blues-style slide! It’s Church’s lyrics that are the problem: just about all his songs are about drinking, coming back to your
home town after a long absence, drinking, breaking up with your girlfriend
(probably because she got tired of his drinking), drinking and drinking some
more. I found myself wondering if Church’s drinking would get to be so much of
a problem he’d have to join Alcoholics Anonymous, whereupon he’d make a concept
album about not drinking. Just
the song titles — at least as far as I could make them out, which wasn’t easy
because Church announced nothing
(he assumed his audience would be familiar with all his songs, and given how
often they were singing along with him, he was probably right) — indicates the
sameness of the material and how he kept going to the same subjects in song
after song after song: “Creepin’,” “Guys Like Me” (as in “guys like me usually
don’t end up with girls like you”), “This Is My Home Town,” “That Was a Cold
One” (as in how dare his girlfriend leave him when he had just one beer left
with which to drown his sorrows), “Sinners Like Me,” “Come On Home, Boy” (in
which the singer is lamenting that his son is wearing hip-hop gear and “pants
on the ground” and wants him to get back to those good ol’ Southern home values
of small-town life and small-town drinking), “Put a Drink in My Hand” (no
thanks, Eric, I think you’ve had enough already), “These Boots” (for which a
woman in the front row actually handed him one of her boots and let him use it as a prop), “Drink a Little
Drink, Smoke a Little Smoke” (well, he’s a country artist and he’s not Willie
Nelson, so the “smoke” is undoubtedly just tobacco), “Soundtrack to a July
Saturday Night,” “The Outsiders” (a quite good piece of material musically),
and his closer, “I Was Gonna Die Young,” in which the singer expresses his
surprise that he’s outlasted Hank Williams and Jesus (mentioned in that order, by the way). I really like Eric
Church’s music but just wish he’d write songs about something else — and I was
also amazed that, unlike a lot of other modern country stars (especially the
men), he doesn’t insist on being
the cutest person in his band: there’s a tall, stocky, heavily tattooed guitar
player whom I thought was sexually hotter than the star!
