By Adam Lucas

 

TAMPA—For six months now, I’ve been trying to convince you that there is absolutely no telling what might happen at an Eric Church show.

 

He might draw inspiration from Prince and cover “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” He might play an entire album front to back. He might incorporate strings and horns and background vocalists and turn “Smoke a Little Smoke” into a Granite Falls rhapsody.

 

And you knew the last show of the Free the Machine tour would have some quirks. You knew he’d play long and you knew he’d veer off the set list. This was, in many ways, the end of a chapter of his career that started at Stagecoach in 2024, evolved into the Evangeline vs. The Machine album and IMAX movie, spread out across three epic nights at Red Rocks in July of 2025, and then culminated in the 46 dates on this tour.

 

Remember how confused some of the attendees were at that Stagecoach performance? By the time this show ended, that type of performance felt completely normal.

 

Even in Pittsburgh on the first night of the tour, there was a little undercurrent of “What is he doing?” when Church played the eight songs from the Evangeline album front to back without stopping. But by Saturday night in Tampa, the “what is he doing” had changed to, “He’s doing this.”

 

The album came alive on this tour. We’ll hear the Evangeline songs again, but never quite like this. Opener Ashley McBryde was talking about that album this weekend. “Can you imagine writing a song like ‘Johnny’ while you’re just sitting in a parking lot?” she asked, talking about the Covenant-inspired song that Church wrote after taking his kids to school. 

 

We got to hear that song for 46 straight concerts, in the same position every single night. The man who tinkers and tweaks and tries new things, instead did those eight Evangeline songs in order every night for 46 straight shows (with the songs evolving with the musicians who played them). That’s how important the presentation was to him. 

 

Maybe you get the Double Down and Holdin’ My Own tours confused. But you will never, ever mistake the Evangeline tour for anything else in Church’s catalog. He eventually played over 80 different songs on stage in these seven months. As he told the musicians when they gathered in his dressing room after Saturday’s concert, “Musically, this was an incredibly rewarding tour.”

 

Then he added something that reminded you that this was also a very typical Eric Church tour. “But it was also very much about the people,” he said. “And I love every one of you.”

 

That’s an Eric Church tour. My wife and I have been fortunate to do this tour together, as we did in 2023. She’s a much more essential part of the entire operation than I am, and midway through Friday night’s show, she texted me, “I’m going to miss this.”

 

That’s because there is so much to miss.

 

There are 104 people on this tour. Almost without fail, they are good-hearted and hard-working and very often, hysterically funny. They are a big goofy family that will most definitely make fun of you at every opportunity but also belt out “Happy Birthday” louder than you’ve ever heard it in an empty pit on the afternoon of a show before doors open.

 

That starts with the person whose name is on the tour. The only way Eric and Katherine Church know how to tour is as a family. They’ve been doing it for years and are essentially experts.

 

It’s easier to make it a family when the kids are young and will basically do whatever you tell them to do. Church’s kids are older now, so including them takes the kind of effort they probably don’t currently appreciate but will one day. On Saturday, with a broken foot that had swollen after Friday night’s performance, Church rode around in a golf cart so he and the boys could play golf together. They probably won’t remember that he played “Bible and a .44” with McBryde on Saturday night and it was absolutely mesmerizing. But they’ll remember that time in the cart.

 

Last week, Boone and Hawk hid 50 eggs around their father’s dressing room for an Easter egg hunt for their four-year-old cousin, Tate. After every show when Hawk Church is in attendance, he has a ritual—which was begun by older brother Boone—with his dad. As soon as Eric leaves the stage, Hawk hides, and Eric’s first task is to find his son. One minute, you’re ripping through “Country Music Jesus.” The next, you’re looking inside cabinets or under couches.

 

That same feeling permeates the entire tour. Background vocalist Moiba Mustapha is perhaps the world’s biggest fan of “Drink In My Hand” and has made it a point to be side stage for the song every night. Last weekend, Church wandered to that side of the stage, grinned at Mustapha’s performance—it’s impossible to watch it without loving the song even more—and then flipped him a guitar pick, the perfect musical salute.

 

You might have noticed that it’s not just Church who gets drink deliveries on stage. Most of the musicians have some kind of hydration either delivered or already in place during their three hours on stage.

 

In recent weeks, bassist Lee Hendricks had been scheming with a member of the shadow crew to ask for ever more complicated concoctions just to see what would happen. At one show he asked for ice with a hole in the middle. At another, he wanted crunchy ice. And in Greenville, he asked for a drink with an umbrella in it.

 

Which is why do-everything technician Zoe Johnson walked on stage during a song break with a small Solo cup shot glass featuring an umbrella propped on the side. Church broke up laughing. “What the fuck,” he asked Hendricks off-mic, “did she just bring you?”

 

Family knows family. 

 

Even if you can’t hear the off-mic comments or see the rounds of golf, the family feeling carries over to the crowd.

 

A core of diehard Choir members was in place waiting in line as early as 3:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. That group had simply driven straight from the Jacksonville show on Friday night and gone immediately to stake a place in line. By lunchtime, there were plenty of familiar faces there. Between Debbie Reed, Steve Maldavir, Jennifer White, Joyce Waddle, Angel Haley-Busby and The Herminator, they’ve got over 400 Church shows to their credit. 

 

And they keep coming back, because they’re a big part of it. These songs were performed for a crowd of zero during rehearsals and the songs are still great, but the atmosphere needs people. And longtime Church fans know that they have no clue what will happen at any given show. For example: for the first time since very early in his career, he might walk on stage without his trademark sunglasses.

 

Understand this: Eric Church is not a big early arrival guy. So his timing in everything he does is coordinated to the moment. He knows exactly how many minutes he needs to walk to the stage, get his guitar from tech MJ Sagraves, and hit the opening notes of “Hands of Time.”

 

Saturday was a little hectic. His ear monitors were knotted and Katherine was trying to detangle them like a string of pesky Christmas lights. The lift raising Church to the stage didn’t fully extend, which is a slight problem when you already have a broken foot and now have to leap onto the stage. 

 

Oh, and one more detail: just before he walked out, Church looked at Katherine. He raised an eyebrow and stared into her eyes. “We forgot something,” he said. Then he looked into those eyes again, and she realized she was looking right back into his eyes, and that could only mean…

 

“Oh, shit,” she said. 

 

The sunglasses were still in the dressing room. At that exact moment, the stage doors swung open and Church walked on stage in front of a sellout crowd. Thanks to some extremely agile maneuvers by several members of his team, the glasses were recovered less than halfway into “Hands of Time.”

 

Church’s impression of his brief foray into natural vision on stage: “It’s really fucking bright up there.”

 

That sentiment made one of the evening’s end of tour pranks (always keep your wits about you on the last day—drummer Craig Wright, for example, held an actual pizza box during his pantomimes at the start of “Give Me Back My Hometown”) extremely appropriate. When Church called everyone back on stage for the tour finale of “Through My Ray-Bans,” most of them showed up wearing—you guessed it—sunglasses.

 

They are, after all, a family. A very, very talented musical family. 

 

“It’s overwhelming,” McBryde said. “The word is completeness. This is what a show should have the ability to be. Whether you have a name for the feeling or not, or believe it is attributed to something larger than us or not, when you hear that many voices and strings and horns, you’re going to make a connection. And whether that connection is with the person next to you or to the band on the stage or to the entire universe, no matter what you name it, you can’t deny that you felt it. That’s what makes this show so incredible. It goes more than 30 songs, and that feeling holds you up the entire way.”

 

It’s going to be difficult not to get the rush of that feeling two or three times every weekend. There’s absolutely no telling what the next iteration of Eric Church will be. It will have great writing and unforgettable songs and otherwise could be almost anything. Because he is who he is, and because he’s never satisfied, the only certainty is that the next version of his artistry will not be the same as this one. And the bar has been set very, very high.

 

“We’ve done a lot of tours,” Church told the crowd on Saturday. “And this is my favorite tour we’ve ever done.”