Eric Church’s Global Rodeo: How a North Carolina Outsider Became the World’s Favorite Soundtrack to Collapse
Eric Church and the Global Ballad of the Disgruntled Everyman
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic
On a recent Wednesday, while the European Central Bank was busy explaining why negative interest rates are “transitory” (a word now flirting dangerously with “eternal”), Eric Kenneth Church—boot-cut avatar of American disillusionment—was in Stockholm, growling “Springsteen” to 15,000 Swedes who knew every syllable but none of the Jersey exits. The scene was instructive. Here was a North Carolinian singing about 1980s Chevrolets to blond teenagers who will probably never drive anything that doesn’t come with an app and a carbon offset. Somewhere in that contradiction lies the international significance of Mr. Church: he exports the myth of the small-town outsider to places that have never seen a Waffle House and, somehow, the ledger balances.
The world has spent the last decade perfecting two products: curated outrage and curated nostalgia. Church sells both, wrapped in denim and distortion pedals. From Sydney to São Paulo, ticket buyers line up to purchase a two-hour reprieve from algorithmic loneliness, eager to trade the soft tyranny of push notifications for the older, more honest tyranny of a bar chord. It’s a fair swap; at least the Marshall stack doesn’t harvest your metadata.
In geopolitical shorthand, Church is the soft-power answer to the hard-power headache of American cultural imperialism. While Washington exports democracy seminars that expire faster than Greek yogurt, Nashville ships guitar solos that colonize hearts one chorus at a time. The State Department could never get a Berlin club full of techno purists to wave tiny U.S. flags, yet let Church hit the refrain of “Record Year” and watch those same skeptics melt like cheap wax. If that isn’t influence, tell it to the ghost of the Marshall Plan.
The cynical among us—hello, you’re reading Dave’s Locker—might note that Church’s rebel posture is itself a multinational franchise. His stage wear is assembled from Bangladeshi cotton, his amplifiers are soldered in Malaysia, and his ticket prices are algorithmically optimized by a Swiss firm whose other clients include several Gulf sovereign wealth funds. The working-man anthem is, by the time it reaches the chorus, a diversified investment vehicle. The irony is artisanal.
Still, the songs work because the grievances are portable. From a pub in Leeds to a karaoke booth in Seoul, the refrain “I like my country rockin’—how ’bout you?” translates the same: a middle finger to whoever happens to be in charge this week. In authoritarian backwaters, that line can get you arrested; in democratic ones, it merely gets you streamed. Both outcomes confirm the song’s relevance, which is the sort of marketing money can’t buy—though it tries, bless its heart.
The pandemic, that unwelcome global houseguest, gave Church a rare chance at accidental diplomacy. When he announced hold-my-beer drive-in concerts in 2020, satellite maps showed glowing rectangles of pickup trucks from Ontario to Alberta, mimicking the layout later copied by Finnish promoters desperate to keep the Nordic summer from going entirely ABBA. In effect, Church staged a proof-of-concept for socially distanced joy; the WHO should send him a fruit basket, but they’re busy renaming variants.
If there is a darker lining—there always is—it’s that the very authenticity Church peddles is now a luxury good. The rural idyll he evokes is being subdivided into Airbnbs faster than you can say “outsider.” The kids moshing in Munich today will spend tomorrow on Zoom calls optimizing supply-chain software, humming “Desperate Man” while their keystrokes are logged by an AI that learned English from, well, probably Eric Church lyrics. The snake eats its own tail, then autotunes it.
Yet despair is poor currency at a stadium show. When the lights cut out and 30,000 phone flashlights rise like a budget Milky Way, nationality dissolves into a single, off-key chorus. For three minutes and thirty seconds, the global economy, climate anxiety, and whatever fresh hell the push alerts brought are deferred. That suspension of disbelief is the rare commodity that never goes negative—though give the ECB time.
In the end, Eric Church tours the planet the way a medieval flagellant once toured plague villages: offering ritual, catharsis, and the comforting illusion that pain shared is pain halved. The difference is the merch table accepts Apple Pay and the whip is metaphorical—unless you count ticket fees. Still, if the world insists on burning, we might as well provide a soundtrack. Strap in, Europe; the choir’s in session and the preacher’s got a Telecaster.
