By Adam Lucas

MILWAUKEE—About two dozen songs into Friday night’s show in a packed Fiserv Forum, Eric Church was having a moment.

In the interest of full disclosure, it was slightly odd timing for a moment. But still, it was a moment.

He’d just finished “Talladega.” It’s a great sing-along, but it’ll make you think, too.

“Like a stone, time rolls on,

You can’t hit pause, that’s just the deal,

Most days in life don’t stand out,

But life’s about those days that will.”

Sometimes it’s easy to just sing the words and not really think about them. This was not one of those times. Hence, a moment.

Eric and Katherine Church’s two sons grew up on the road. Music has always been a family endeavor. Maybe the boys stayed on the bus during some shows, but they were always around.

As they get older, though, Boone and Hawk Church have their own things to do. They want to hang out with friends or they have their own sporting events or school responsibilities. That’s the thing with kids: just when they’re starting to develop their own personalities, to really be fun, they suddenly become their own people. Soon you find that you’re missing someone who still lives in your house. As they get older, it’s not always as guaranteed that all four members of the family will be together at any given show.

On Friday night, though, they were. At some point during “Talladega,” Church started thinking about how grateful he was for the occasion. Which led to his moment.

“That felt like it was 2014 all over again,” he told the crowd when everyone in attendance finished the last verse together.

“One of the first times we played here,” he said, “the boys were around three years old and one.” Unexpectedly, perhaps, the emotion of having watched them grow up on the road seemed to creep (not Creepin’, that’s something different) up on him.

He’s expressed similar sentiments over the last year at other shows. It usually comes before a song that fits the mood, perhaps “Holdin’ My Own.” The story flows right into the song.

This one was…different. This time, the next song on the set list was “That’s Damn Rock & Roll.” It’s a slightly different transition—even for the master of transitions—from wistfully thinking about your kids getting older to one of the hardest-rocking songs of the night.

As he started thinking about the lines he was about to sing, even Church had to laugh. “I should’ve used this speech for another song,” he said. “I was moved by the moment!”

There was no way around it. A couple seconds after delivering a heartfelt message about his gratitude for having his boys on the road, Church sang these lines through his own sheepish laughter:

“It ain’t a needle in a vein

It ain’t backstage sex

It ain’t lines of cocaine on a private jet.”

It was just one of the memorable moments from a second straight night in Wisconsin, a place where Church very obviously feels completely at home. “Anybody who knows anything about me,” he said near the beginning of the show, “knows what this state means to me.”

That meant he was willing to challenge the crowd. During “Creepin’,” he wasn’t quite satisfied with what he was getting from them. He challenged them during the chorus to give him more, and they responded—and kept responding for the rest of the night.

And he was willing to challenge himself. Remember, music belongs to the entire family. So he told the crowd this story:

“Every night my wife and I go over the set list, and every night she tries to put this song in. And every night, I say, ‘No fucking way.’ And after what she has deemed to be too many ‘No fucking ways,’ I’m going to do this shit tonight.”

It took just a few seconds to prove her right. “Look Good And You Know It” began with an intro from choir members Moiba Mustapha and Maureen Murphy. The song immediately gained a convert.

“Damn,” Church said as Mustapha and Murphy finished the intro. “That was good. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

He hasn’t played the song live in a year and a half and Friday night’s performance was just the sixth in the last four years. When he finished, he had to admit defeat. “Chances of that not being on the set list tomorrow?” he asked from the stage. “Zero.”

He finished the night by stretching his audible segment of the set into a couple extra songs. By the time he finished, he’d played 31 songs, more full-length songs than any other stop on the tour so far (“Love Your Love the Most” last night was only a verse). He’d made good on a promise from earlier in the show. “We’re going to set the song record for this tour tonight,” he’d told the crowd. “We’re going to put up a number the rest of the tour has to try to get.”

Everyone together—artist, family, band, crowd—did it together.

Which ensured that everyone in attendance—including and most especially Eric Church—had a moment at Friday night’s show.