Eric Church’s critically-acclaimed album CHIEF has been certified Platinum by the RIAA. CHIEF, released last July, debuted at No. 1 on both the Billboard Top 200 and Country album charts. The album’s third single “Springsteen,” co-written by Church, continues to hold the No. 1 spot on the country radio charts for the second consecutive week. Ironically 28 years ago on the same week that Church’s “Springsteen” went No. 1, Bruce Springsteen charted his first and only No. 1 on the pop charts with “Dancing in the Dark.”
“I’m so reverent about the process of making records. I look at the records Waylon [Jennings] made and [Johnny] Cash made, and you could go back and AC/DC or [Led] Zeppelin, you can go through any format. I feel like I’m given a small window of opportunity to make a certain number of records and it’s my responsibility to them, and to the format, and to the reverence I have for it to make records that stand up and that you can put up on a shelf with them. I think it’s every artist’s responsibility. I think if you’re not making records that way you shouldn’t be making records. So, I get real, real, real crazy about…is the mix right, does this need to be more…just the tweaking part. And then the sequencing, I want you to start at the first song and take a journey to the end and never have any misses, and never go, ‘I wish this song was here,’ or ‘I felt that the record got to slow here.’ So I re-sequence it 15, 16, 17, 20 thousand times to where I’m finally going, ‘Ok, this is the record.’ And finally people have to intervene. They have to come in and go, ‘It’s done. It’s great, let us have it.’”
Bruce Springsteen never had a number 1 single. “Dancing in the Dark” was a number 2 hit single (his highest). If you check the charts you’ll see that Prince’s “When Doves Cry” kept it out of the top slot.