By Adam Lucas

 

CLEVELAND—Here’s what you do.

 

You create the most ambitious show of your career. You put some horns on the stage, and some strings, and you play an entire album straight through at the start of every show. You move your song that’s on the Rolling Stone list of top songs of the 21^st century into the middle of the show.

 

Even as you are crafting this show, you know not everyone is going to fully embrace the entire story it is telling. Two months ago during rehearsals, Eric Church’s manager, John Peets, gestured at the pre-show videos and the drawings that fill the background and said, “I know not everyone is going to get it.”

 

And then, when you have created all of this, everything that makes up the Free the Machine tour, what do you do? Do you just follow the script?

 

Hell no. You keep creating.

 

Saturday night’s show was another step in that evolution. If you saw the first performance of the latest Church tour in Pittsburgh and then saw the 13^th show here in Cleveland, you would notice a change. This was the last show before a 10-day break, and it’s well deserved. Over the last five weekends, it’s done what all really good tours do: it’s gotten sharper, it’s gotten more fun, and it’s gotten significantly more spontaneous.

 

The first eight songs, when Church plays the entire Evangeline vs. the Machine album front to back, might have been a little hesitant on that first night. How was this going to go over? Was Church, a master of stage banter, really not going to talk to the crowd for eight whole songs?

 

It’s true that the crowd hasn’t lived with those eight songs for two decades the same way they have their favorites from Sinners Like Me. But they’re learning. Church’s back and forth with Joanna Cotten during “Darkest Hour” is a highlight, and by the time Church sings, “Raise your hands, all hail rock and roll,” in “Evangeline,” most of the hands are already raised.

 

As those songs have begun to carry their own weight, it’s opened up the rest of the show for more tinkering. “Smoke a Little Smoke” has turned into a “Proud Mary” mashup, adding another chapter to the argument about what that song is really about.

 

Saturday night was the first show of this tour that did not include a previously unplayed tour song. So what did Church do? He took “Mistress Named Music” and turned it upside down, inviting opener Marcus King back to the stage to start “Delilah” on keys and then step to the front to take the lead on guitar in “Mistress.”

 

You think the people in the stands don’t know what’s going to happen next? The people on the stage aren’t completely sure. One mile away, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame smiled knowingly.

 

We’ve reached the point that Church is having fun with the tour, and that’s a dangerous place to be. “What do you think, Driver?” he asked Driver Williams midway through Saturday’s show. “Should we do the new one?”

 

Fans knew this was a realistic question. He did a completely unexpected new one, “New Old Me,” at Red Rocks. He wrote a new one, “On the Road,” in the middle of the Outsiders Revival tour.

 

This time, the “new one” in question was “Springsteen.” Church just laughed.

 

After he played “Springsteen” and “Drink In My Hand” back to back, a hearty fan near the front of section 120 screamed, “One more!”

 

It was a reasonable guess. Those are two huge, encore-type songs. But it ain’t that kind of show, brother. It was only 10:48 p.m. At that time, Church might play one more album.

 

Way back in Pittsburgh, the show was ending around 11:15 p.m. Five weeks later, we’re about a half-hour past that, because there are just too many good ideas to try. Saturday, Chief decided on the spur of the moment that he and Cotten should do not just “Drowning Man” together, as they had planned, but also “Like Jesus Does.”

 

His solo portion of the show could be one or two songs…or it could be four, like Saturday. “Don’t egg me on,” he told a crowd screaming for their favorites, and proceeded to cruise through “Talladega,” “Carolina,” “Love Your Love the Most,” and “These Boots.”

 

And the whole thing is kind of magic. The musicians and the crew have taken this ever-breathing, ever-developing thing to 13 very different cities, from the East Coast to the heartland to the Midwest, and for two hours (and growing) every single time, these very different people in these very different places do something they would never do in any other situation: they all react the exact same way.

 

They sing and they put their arms around each other and sometimes they cry and sometimes they do whatever the guy in the denim vest with the picture of The Outsiders cover on the back was doing in the floor seats Saturday night, as he somehow did an interpretation of the dance from “Footloose” set to “Springsteen.” That might sound strange to you but just know that it worked.

 

Because sometimes you’ve just got to try it and see what happens.

 

We’ll all reconvene in Salt Lake City a week and a half from now. Imagine what Church can do with ten days to think about how he might make it even better.