Eric Church Dreams Up the Citizens of ‘Crazyland’
"That’s Sad in the corner with his heart on his sleeve / Talking to Regret who’s never gonna leave ..."
Eric Church dreams up a whole world of heartache in the new track, “Crazyland.”
Written by the country star with Luke Laird and Michael Heeney, the two-minute-and-fifty-second track features a relaxing acoustic sound but a tormented theme, all about a guy at war with himself. Each verse imagines the emotions of a breakup as physical characters — Sad, Regret, All My Fault and I Told You So all make appearances — and then Church installs them as the citizens of an internal “crazyland.”
“You never know who you’re gonna run into in crazyland,” he sings.
Appearing on The Bobby Bones Show, Church explained he dreamt the song’s chorus and woke up to write it down, part of the month-long retreat in rural North Carolina where he wrote and recorded a song from start to finish each day. Other tracks born from that process and already released include “Stick That In Your Country Song,” “Bad Mother Trucker” and more
“As a songwriter you always have that moment when a song is born and then you have two months or three months before you get in the studio and you bring that thing to life. And I just thought that the feeling and the experience of that is something that we underestimate,” he explained. “So I wanted to, this time, strip all of that down and when the song is born, whatever those things are in the atmosphere that make it turn into something magical, I wanted to try to grab that.”
Many of those songs will eventually be collected and released as a full studio album, but there’s no word on when that will be. Church is determined to take his time with this project, and it seems world events are on his side.
“It’s the most special project of my career and we’re gonna treat it that way,” he says. “So I think this is something we’re gonna have a lot of fun with over the next period of time, whenever we get to go back and be somewhat normal.”
