Though its tracklist is compact in comparison, Eric Church’s follow-up to his ambitious 2021 triple album Heart & Soul is no less potent than its predecessor. Evangeline vs. The Machine, produced by longtime collaborator Jay Joyce, finds country music’s favorite Chief fearlessly commenting on current events and sharing vulnerable moments, doing so with all the style and swagger that fans have come to love and expect. Church tells Apple Music he believes Evangeline vs. The Machine is “the most creative album” he’s ever made, thanks in part to his decision to bring an orchestra into the recording studio. The resulting sound is rich and often surprising, with an expansive nature that mimics the big, complex themes Church explores in his lyrics. “There’s a tension that strings and vocals provide that you can’t get from a guitar, you can’t get from a keyboard, just because of the mechanism of the way they’re moving their arms,” he says. “There’s a tension. They can create drama. And a lot of this record has drama. I think that it almost sounds like a soundtrack. It sounds like a movie soundtrack.” Opening track “Hands of Time,” an ode to the healing power of music and a rebuke of outgrowing youthful abandon, takes that cinematic feel and infuses it with the kind of crunchy heartland sound that made songs like “Drink in My Hand” and “Springsteen” smash hits. “Johnny” refers not to Cash but to the hell-fighting hero of Charlie Daniels’ classic “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” with Church pleading for the fictional fiddler to grab his bow and “send him to hell again.” Church wrote the emotional ballad, which makes the most of Church’s orchestra, after the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, which claimed the lives of three children and three adults. “Darkest Hour” also finds Church responding to recent events, as he released the poignant song ahead of the album to raise funds for victims of Hurricane Helene in 2024. And “Evangeline” is Church’s personification of the creative muse, who is ever at odds with the machine of capitalism. Below, Church shares insight into several key tracks. “Bleed on Paper” “‘Bleed on paper,’ that is selling your soul. You’re never going to get that back. A lot of young artists, they don’t know that. They don’t have a choice. And I think that that’s what gets hard. Staying true to [yourself] is the biggest challenge, I think for not just country music, but for music as we go forward in this river that is just so flooded with crap. How do you swim in that? And I think that that’s the hardest thing. If I was a young artist right now, that would be a challenge.” “Johnny” “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life as a parent was dropping my kids off the day after the shooting. They went to school and everybody thought it was good to go back to school and get the kids. And I understood that, but that’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I sat in the parking lot a while. I was about to drive back home, and ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ came on. There’s that line, ‘Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard/Hell’s broke loose in Georgia and the devil deals the cards/And if you win, you get a shiny fiddle made of gold/If you lose, the devil gets your soul.’ And I remember that line hit and I was like, ‘God, we need Johnny, because the devil’s not in Georgia, he’s here. He’s everywhere and he’s winning.’” “Darkest Hour” “In ‘Darkest Hour,’ first time we went through it, in the back half of that song, there’s a flute. And it’s a flute that sounds like a baby elephant is throwing his trunk from the right to the left. The track was going really well, and all of a sudden that came in and I lost it. I stopped the entire orchestra. I said, ‘Was that a flute?’ And then there’s a girl that was playing and I said, ‘No, that’s great.’ I said, ‘I didn’t see that coming.’ And so it’s just one of those things where you have these moments that I would never have conceived, I would never have thought about, but you’re actually going to these people who are really talented people and you’re playing the song and you’re going, ‘Okay, now you paint on this picture.’” “Evangeline” “Evangeline, to me, in this record represents creativity, and the machine is the things we deal with now that push against or round off that creativity. Evangeline is the muse for creativity in this album. And everything in our world right now is going to push against that. And it does, even for people who are pretty creative: ‘It can’t be this long, this is the only snippet that you can put on YouTube.’ So everything that you have commercially with what the machine is, it pushes against that. And that’s a fight. And this record’s a fight in that way. I’m trying to let this record, which is the most creative I’ve ever done, be a beacon for that creativity.”