Debut Album’s Influence at 20

In 2002, a new-to-Nashville Eric Church sat down to play a few songs at his first publishing meeting in town. And the executive there to listen hated every last one of them.

Church, who had recently moved from his home state of North Carolina, had started compiling the tracks that would become his 2006 debut, Sinners Like Me. The 25-year-old was writing about pregnancy (“Two Pink Lines”), Merle Haggard (“Pledge Allegiance to the Hag”), and the death penalty (“Lightning”). No love songs, unless you count ones about unprotected teenage horniness. No bacchanalian bottomless party tunes, unless you count ones about raising a glass beside a jukebox full of old country records. Just real life. The publisher wasn’t impressed. 

“He told me I should go back home to North Carolina,” Church told Playboy last year about that ill-fated meeting. But Church, who was just as interested at the time as being a songwriter as a performer, didn’t heed the advice. Instead, he leaned in harder, focusing on what he would come to refer to in interviews as the “800-pound gorilla in the room” that everyone notices but no one mentions. The tough stuff that people ignore: stories from growing up in the small town of Granite Falls with a police chief grandfather and parents who worked in the furniture business. Stories about people like him, his culture, his faith, his musical obsessions and influences like Haggard, Bob Seger, and Bruce Springsteen that, at the time, weren’t exactly in step with country radio. He loved fiddles and power chords in equal measure.

The rejection, as it always would, fueled Church. He knew that what he was making was worth hearing, because he could see it on the faces of the fans that followed him from show to show — fans that would call themselves “The Church Choir.” Church eventually found his home at Sony Publishing, Capitol Records, and with a creative team that includes longtime producer Jay Joyce and manager John Peets, and got to work on his debut record. Sinners Like Me came out 20 years ago on July 18th, and since then, Church has become one of the defining and most influential country performers and songwriters of his generation and beyond. He is the epitome of an artist who follows his gut, and his fans, even if an asshole in a suit (whom he’ll later refer to as “the devil walking among us,” on “Devil, Devil [Prelude: Princess of Darkness]” from The Outsiders) might not agree. And those fans aren’t just country fans, or rock fans. They are Eric Church fans.

But Sinners Like Me wasn’t an explosive breakthrough when it came to sales. It wasn’t Church’s breakthrough when it came to his recording career either — that debatably came in 2011 with Chief, which skyrocketed him to a new level of global fame. Peaking at Number 7 on the Billboard country charts, Sinners Like Me failed to boast a Top 10 single, though songs like “How ‘Bout You,” Two Pink Lines,” and “Guys Like Me” fared well enough at radio.

But it did become a blueprint for how Church would proceed through this entire career, continuing with his vision despite what might be more marketable, leading with whatever sort of musical palate and story suited his fancy. And it’s the slow burn of Sinners Like Me that really tells the story of Church. Now certified Platinum, it proved how he built the kind of catalog full not of disposable radio singles, but bodies of work that fans would keep going back to and discovering, year after year. Album cuts, like “These Boots,” from Sinners Like Me, didn’t just make it into live shows — they became staples.

Church, born Kenneth Eric Church, was 13 when he wrote his first song. His parents Ken and Rita knew that their son had a palpable interest in music that showed up when he was just a toddler, and their little boy loved to watch his mother sing in church or listen to records. By 16, after Church bought a guitar at a local shop and taught himself how to play, he knew his mission was to move to Nashville, become a songwriter, and tell his stories. So, his dad made a deal. If he went to college and graduated, he and Rita would pay for this first year in Music City.

That seemed a decent enough deal for Church, who went to study marketing at Appalachian State University. To keep focused on his ultimate goal, he formed a band — the Mountain Boys, with some friends and his brother Brandon — and started gigging around at any bars in the Boone, North Carolina, area that would take him. “When I came to Nashville, I was more seasoned,” Church told the Hickory Daily Record, a local North Carolina paper, in 2005. Church was clearly a gifted writer and performer, but in those bars, he learned the importance of connecting with an audience, even if it was playing the same 12 cover songs in a row. And he wanted longevity, not to be some sort of flash in the pan, ephemeral radio success. “I would love to have the kind of career where I could do this for 20 years,” he said. His family helped him move to Tennessee shortly after graduation, and he spent his first few years in town focused on songwriting.

But for Church, that desire for longevity didn’t mean capitulating. For a mainstream artist in 2006, it wasn’t expected that you wrote all your own songs. But Church wanted to. Pop crossovers, polished ballads and the young seeds of bro-country were what populated the radio, but Church loved harder rock influences, outlaw heroes, and even the Muscle Shoals soul. You can hear it from the explosive riffs that open the album on “Before She Does,” the waltzing confessional of “Sinners Like Me,” and the evocative imagery of “The Hard Way.” And then, of course, there’s the Victoria Shaw co-write, “Two Pink Lines,” that’s about getting accidentally knocked up — under a blanket by the riverbank. 

Plenty of people told Church that writing a song about teenage pregnancy wasn’t exactly good business, but he didn’t just include it on Sinners Like Me, he also made it a single. It peaked at 19 which, for such a promising act, didn’t exactly live up to expectations (though absurd, the barometer for success for a male country artist is simply to log Number One songs). But other songwriters and artists took notice of the kinds of risks and choices that Church was making, after Sinners Like Me was released in the summer of 2006. “It changed the temperature in a co-write for the next couple years,” Kip Moore tells Rolling Stone. “Artists and writers felt the elevated bar from that record. It was a palpable feeling.”

To support the album, Church hit the road — quite famously, or infamously, as the opening act for Rascal Flatts. Church routinely went over the allotted time in his sets (and the allotted volume), and eventually got fired from the tour. A little-known artist named Taylor Swift subbed in next. “The word got around that we were trouble,” he told Rolling Stone, so he started playing rock clubs instead, specifically ones in the same cities where Rascal Flatts were performing. Church was making a point: that fans would follow him where he went for his live shows. He was building something. Seger, his longtime idol, took notice, and invited him to open.

“Bob Seger was a guy who saved my career,” Church said on his Outsiders Radio. “He heard my first album, and invited me to open for him…Bob has always been my guy.  If you give me one artist, it’s Bob Seger…You probably hear more of him in my music than anyone else.”

Opening for Seger gave Church a pedigree at a time when Music Row was keeping their distance and helped him establish something he’d been trying to do all along, which was connect with fans through the song and the performance, and not just via whatever genre section he’s filed in at the store.

Sinners Like Me made its way to songwriter Kassi Ashton, who was in sixth grade when it was released. “Country music is known for real stories, but Eric’s are different,” she tells Rolling Stone. “He doesn’t just hit familiar tropes and buzz words from a vague place. He doesn’t pander to grow a larger audience. His writing is universal, while still being extremely specific to situations and feelings within the culture that are also true for him. Eric holds full responsibility for showing me as a songwriter and as an artist that the more unapologetic and specific I am about who I am and what I’ve seen, the better off I’ll be in this career, even if it takes a while.”

It also eventually ended up on the CD player of a student at Church’s alma mater, an 18-year-old kid named Luke Combs. Combs wasn’t a fan of country music at the time, but word about Church was spreading around North Carolina, so he started diving into his records. Combs now credits Sinners Like Me, and the follow-up, Carolina, with showing him that the genre of country music was so much more expansive, and emotional, that he’d ever realized.

“He does have that ‘outsider’ thing, because some of what he does is unconventional, but it’s just having the guts to step outside of the box and do things how you want to do them,” Combs told the Nashville Scene.

By 2008, Church hadn’t yet released his second record, and Music Row still looked at him with some trepidation — he was breaking rules if not making his own, which is the last thing a Nashville artist is advised to do. But it was impossible to deny what he was creating. When the Hickory Daily Record showed up at a meeting of the Church Choir, they encountered a man who had already seen Church live 55 times and raved about how he felt like he truly cared about his fans. Seven years later, Church never stopped making good on that promise, delivering his fifth album, Mr. Misunderstood, directly to the Church Choir, on vinyl, for free. He never stopped writing about that “800 pound gorilla,” either.

“Once you’ve seen him live, you’re in love for the rest of your life,” the fan told the paper. He was showing off a new tattoo, inked with three words: sinners like me.