Heart & Soul singer wraps Gather Again Tour in NYC
Eric Church set an all-time attendance record at the Gila River Arena in Glendale, AZ over the weekend. The country superstar performed to an audience of 16,401 as the second to last stop on his 55 show Gather Again Tour that kicked off last fall.
Ahead of closing out the US leg at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Friday, May 20th, Eric Church took home 2022’s Billboard Music Awards’ Top Country Tour award over the weekend. It’s an award the Chief wears like a badge of honor.
Just over a year ago Church graced the magazine’s cover talking about the future of touring: how, when and what it would feel like, with The Wall Street Journal taking note of his leadership pioneering the return of arena-sized live music.
“We all held faith that live music would return,” reminds the CMA Entertainer of the Year winner of the two year hiatus spent away from the Church Choir. “Every night when we hit the stage there’s a moment where I think we can’t go any harder; then we see someone in the crowd who reminds us how fortunate this time is together because they’re so in it … and it’s like we’re in overtime. The stakes are higher and the plays are bigger. To take home this award means that we all came through this together because we believed we would, and we did. And music did that. Country music did that.”
Church continues to expand the parameters of his live shows with two distinct one-night-only stadium concerts at Milwaukee’s American Family Field on May 28ht and Minneapolis’ US Bank Stadium on June 11th on the heels of The Gather Again Tour’s US wrap.
“Playing Nissan Stadium as our last show in 2019 without knowing it was our last left an impression on us,” he adds. “When there’s that much raw energy in one place, it creates a different kind of show. It’s not something we want to do night-after-night, but in the right stadium on the right night, we gotta keep it going!”
Church and Universal Music Group are prepping to release all three of last year’s Heart & Soul albums into two limited edition vinyl box sets. Each album has been pressed on limited edition splatter colored 180-gram vinyl for inclusion. This gives non fan club members a chance to purchase the Church Choir exclusive middle album, &, for the first time in the set as well as on CD, black vinyl and digital, separately on August 19th.
