Eric Church Became Desperate to Record ‘Desperate Man’

Eric Church was truly desperate to record his upcoming new album, Desperate Man. The North Carolina native admitted he was stumped by the creative process, and initially unsure what kind of record he wanted to make.

“The reason it’s called Desperate Man is from a point in time in the process where I became desperate to find an album,” admitted Church. “We approached this album just like we approach every album. We have a creative group of people. My manager, John Peets, my wife Katherine, [publisher] Arthur Buenahora, Jay Joyce, the producer, and myself, and we go in and take a batch of songs that we’ve been working on and they rate them one to four stars.

“And the four stars songs across the board – I get two votes even though they’ll deny that – the maximum amount is basically 20 points that you can get,” he continued. “So, the songs that we started with for Desperate Man were the 20-point songs. The cannot miss, these are the ones, and after three songs in the studio, none of those three songs are on the album.”

Desperate Man is Church’s sixth studio album, but for the first time, he was unsure what to do, or how to move forward.

“We were lost, in my opinion,” he conceded. “I think there was a lot going on there. I had an interesting year personally, and, just in the studio, that safe – what we thought was gonna be the album wasn’t working with the creative energy. Two different things were going on. So, what’s interesting about Desperate Man was when I went into the album-making process, that song was not written. Like a lot of them on the record, they had not been created yet. I think that desperation of trying to find what this album is, led itself so that song and let it to the title of the album.”

Church may have had trouble initially finding the direction for Desperate Man, but he knew exactly what he wanted to do for the video for his current single, the title track. In the video, Church plays a fugitive, guilty of trying to get his latest set of tunes into the hands of his fans.

“My favorite video of my entire career is ‘Desperate Man,’” admitted Church. “It’s my favorite video. And I think that maybe we’re all shady characters, but I thought everybody played their part so well in that video … The whole thing to me was just the perfect culmination at this part in our career.”

Church co-wrote “Desperate Man” with Ray Wylie Hubbard, inspired in part by the tragic Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting, where Church played earlier in the weekend.

“I was a little lost for a while. I think like a lot of people I was in a little bit of a funk after something like that,” Church told Rolling Stone Country. “I was still a little burned out. A little bit going through the motions. I think that’s part of what happened when I first went into the studio, is I still wasn’t quite ready to get there. That’s where ‘Desperate Man’ kind of came from.”

Desperate Man will be out on Friday, Oct.5. Pre-order the project at EricChurch.com.

Photo Credit: Getty images/Tim Mosenfelder