By Adam Lucas

 

KNOXVILLE—In a packed Thompson-Boling Arena, there were 15,000 fans who all felt like Eric Church was singing directly to them.

 

And one individual who knew exactly what that sounded like.

 

As Church reconvened the Free the Machine tour in Knoxville on Thursday night, Arturo Buenahora stood discreetly in the pit. Church roamed the stage, cruising through 29 songs from the last two decades of his career, and Buenahora was the only one who knew Church when there was no career. No tour. No albums. Not even a publishing deal.

 

Buenahora was with Sony when Church had just moved to Nashville. The fledgling songwriter had experienced a couple meetings that didn’t go well, and wasn’t sure this one would be much better. But when he played “Lightning” for Buenahora, the executive was intrigued.

 

“Who’d you write that with?” he asked.

 

“I wrote it by myself,” said the kid from Granite Falls.

 

That’s when Buenahora knew. “OK, let’s do it,” he said. And Eric Church had his first publishing deal.

 

“He just writes great songs,” Buenahora said on Thursday night. “He was writing things that nobody else was writing. It was really honest and authentic, and none of it felt pretend. When your job is listening to songs all day, you hear all the ideas. People chase what’s working. He wasn’t chasing anybody.”

 

And he hasn’t chased anybody since then. They chase him. In January, one of the biggest current artists in America put out a new album. Tucked discreetly in the songs…horns. Church has been touring with horns since the summer of 2023 and they’re an integral part of the Evangeline vs. The Machine album and this tour. It won’t be long before he tries something new. And then everyone else will catch up and try something “new” a couple of years after that. 

 

Thursday night wasn’t quite a hometown show—we’ll get there tomorrow, or at least close enough—but there’s a strong Tennessee thread in his life, largely due to his wife Katherine, a Volunteer state native. So he knows how to work a room full of Vols, as when on the penultimate song of the evening, he started with “Rocky Top” before transitioning into “A Man Who Was Gonna Die Young.”

 

“Dad, how long are you going to play tonight?” one of his sons had asked him before the show. It was a school night and he had to get back to Nashville.

 

The answer was pretty easy: “As long as Knoxville will have me,” Church replied.

 

He understood this crowd. “The same kind of people I grew up with,” Church told the arena, “are the same kind of people who are here. So this is an important show for me.”

 

He’s right. Friday night in Greensboro he will be 103 miles from Granite Falls. Tonight he was just 187 miles away from home, and it felt like it. From the moment the pre-show video began to the final bows from all two dozen people on stage, the crowd responded.

 

The highlights were numerous. “Give Me Back My Hometown” was one of the best of the tour. Church put a slightly different intro on “Mr. Misunderstood.” He was joined by Joanna Cotten near the end of the set and asked her, “You OK with this?” She just grinned. “I’m not sure what ‘this’ is,” she said frankly, since “Mixed Drinks About Feelings” hadn’t been on the set list and was a spur of the moment addition.

 

All three of those songs were standouts on Thursday, and all three of them had something very important in common, just like almost the entire Church catalog: he wrote them.

 

Remember, going as far back as that meeting in the conference room when so many people had told him no and one person finally told him yes—he just writes great songs.

 

“The blueprint is to write the best album you can and play shows relentlessly,” Buenahora said. “You’ll get your head kicked in and maybe it’ll work. It’s a hard business. It’s a long shot. Some people want to do what’s already working or what they think might work. Other people know what they do, and they do that and hope it works. To me, that’s what an artist is. Eric has never tried to copy anybody. He’d rather fail doing something his way that’s his idea than copy somebody else.”

 

There was a time that only one person believed. Now there are arenas full of them all over the country—Church Choir members who line up hours before the show and the lady in meet and greet who plans to ink his signature on her arm to one year old Maddie and three year old Brody, both of whom were smiling and clapping along with “Drink In My Hand” and got a fist bump from Chief himself during the song.

 

It all had to start somewhere.

 

“It would have happened either way,” Buenahora said. “He was too good for it not to happen. But I’m glad I got to be the guy who believed on that day.”

 

Which led us—through bars and clubs and controversy and hits and misses—to this day. When everyone believed.