By Adam Lucas

AUSTIN—Over the first 35 dates of the Free the Machine tour, Eric Church has established a very fitting close to the show.

By this point in the tour, there are very few secrets, so it’s not spoiling anything to tell you that the most frequent closing number—and the one that was rehearsed, planned and perfected back in August before the tour began—is “Through My Ray-Bans.” It’s the appropriate song to end a night of, as Church likes to tell tour crowds, “a night that is all about the music.” Everyone comes back on stage, the lyrics and lights and video and photo montage are just right, and it’s perfect.

Perfect, of course, is exactly the time Church is always going to wonder if it could be a little better.

And so, for the 36^th show, with many in an appreciative Moody Center thinking they knew what was about to happen, he changed the ending.

It must have been something about the combination of being three dozen dates into one tour, an opener in Stephen Wilson Jr. who was willing to take some chances with Church, and a familiarity with the locale. After all, as he noted early in the show, Chief’s first performance in Austin was at Antone’s, where approximately 400 people could fit in the lower room and up to 300 could squeeze into the upper room.

“We played the upper room,” Church said with a grin. “What I remember is that the food was good and the beer was really cold.”

So why not give anyone committed enough to have been at Antone’s in 2006 and the Moody Center in 2026 a little something different? Church and Wilson had spent a fair amount of time together over the last 24 hours; Wilson is prone to zooming around the big backstage areas on a scooter and Church is not really a scooter guy, but they connected on music.

Which is why Church looked out at the crowd after more than two dozen songs and close to three hours and said, “We’re going to do something a little different. If you’ve been following along at home, this show is going to end differently than what you think it’s going to end.”

That’s when he brought Wilson, who was lurking near the back of the stage—“Come on out,” Church told him. “They can see you. You did a horrible job hiding.”—back to the microphone. They’d collaborated the night before in Fort Worth on a pair of songs, and this time they wanted to add a third to their repertoire.

“We have never done this,” Church said. “The great thing about music is we are just going to fucking give it a try.”

They rolled straight into “Pancho and Lefty,” originally made famous by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and a song Church had only performed three times previously live.  

It’s easy to identify Church and Wilson as similar types of musical innovators. Watching them on stage, you got the feeling they could have played for hours and been perfectly happy with no idea of where it might end up. “I love you, Eric Church,” Wilson said after Church introduced the two-song finale. 

A riveting “Pancho” gave way to “Seven Spanish Angels,” the Willie Nelson/Ray Charles song they’d done the night before, featuring Church and Wilson in front of the two dozen other musicians who have made this tour so different.

It was epic and unforgettable and…you may not ever see it again. “What I love about live music,” Church has said on this tour, “is knowing that you’re seeing something in that moment. It’s live and only the people in that room are having that moment and sharing that experience.” He’s constantly chasing that moment and looking for new ways to take a crowd with him. Most times it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but there’s always the buzz of trying.

Saturday night, Austin had a moment. And there are ten more dates on the tour to make more.