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Eric Church Reveals Story Behind ‘Heart on Fire,’ Calls It Major ‘Icebreaker’ for New Album

Eric Church gets real discussing the songwriting process behind his latest. The country singer opened up about the song “Heart on Fire.” That tune proves to be a major cornerstone of his massive triple album Heart & Soul.

For those that don’t know, Church decided to release not one, not two, but three albums. The albums connect to form one massive project. Church and his fellow songwriters worked on the project amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Church and his collaborators hit the road heading to North Carolina. They spent around a month among the mountains, stretching their creative forces. “Heart on Fire” was among those tunes that Church wrote during the trip. The country singer described the song as the “icebreaker” for the entire project. It helped kick off all the songs that followed.

“Heart on Fire’ was the first song we recorded when we got to North Carolina,” Church told Pop Culture. “I already had pretty much, I wrote this song by myself. But I already had this song on the rails. And we were heading down the path of what this was going to be. I thought we needed to kind of break the ice and get started on something, you know. We were doing something that was tough to do – writing the song the same day we were recording it. This was the song that was kind of the icebreaker for the whole project. And I credit this song a lot for getting us to where we ended up getting to with the project.”

Eric Church on Story Behind the Song

Eric Church focuses on romance and love in “Heart on Fire.” Who can forget their first love after all? Joanna Cotten joins Church for some unforgettable vocals. The country singer draws more from the Southern Rock genre to create the mash-up. Think a little bit of Elvis Presley mixed with Don Henley. But there are no mistaking Church’s signature vibes.

Lyrics include: “A turned up radio but that static was heavy / Couldn’t make out any words but ‘Take me to the levee/ That look on your face was full of wild desire / Soakin’ my soul in gas and settin’ my heart on fire.”

“Heart on Fire” became the focus of Church’s Heart album. Church continued discussing the behind-the-scenes process behind the tune.

“Normally if we had four songs about heart, with the way we used to do this we would cut three of them out and we’d do one,” Church told the outlet. “It started to be cool that this time we could lean into that sameness and the themes where you can put the songs together and know we wrote these within this much time of each other.”