Eric Church Says His Controversial Stagecoach Performance Wasn’t For The “30,000 TikTokers Who Were There To Be Seen”

Bringing it back to the music.

The annual Stagecoach Music Festival in Indio, California has become a hotspot for influencers over the past few years, people who aren’t really interested in country music but want to throw on their cowboy hats and daisy dukes for a weekend so they can make TikToks and partner with brands for content.

And that’s a big part of the reason Eric Church‘s performance back in 2024 was so controversial.

If you don’t remember the performance (I’d be surprised), Church used his headlining slot to deliver an hour and a half acoustic performance, backed only by a gospel choir, during which he dug deep back into music history for everything from gospel classics like Hank Williams’ “I Saw The Light” to the Al Green hit “Take Me To The River” and Snoop Dogg’s “Gin & Juice.”

It was ballsy. It pissed people off. And it was incredible.

During the set, videos quickly began circulating of angry fans demanding that Church play his hits, and eventually leaving the show altogether. Plenty of people didn’t think that a headlining set at a festival was the type of place to try something like that. Some online declared that he had just committed “career suicide,” a comment that I quoted in the headline of an article summarizing the online backlash to the performance.

And when Church was asked during a PBS documentary about that headline and how it made him felt, his response was exactly what you expected if you know anything about Eric Church:

“Would it surprise you to say good?”

He even compared the performance to Bob Dylan’s controversial set from the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when he played with electric instruments:

“It’s like Dylan goes electric at Newport, right? That didn’t go well, in the moment. People talk about that as a paradigm shift in music, but among people that were there in that crowd, and I talked to some people that were, it did not go well.

And I think that sometimes you have to kind of put that out there creatively and go, ‘Hey, this is a one-time thing, and we’re giving it to this crowd for this moment. We’re doing it one time and we’re committing to the moment.’ And you’ve just kind of gotta follow that compass and go with it and let it go.”

And in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Church admits that he went into the performance knowing that it wasn’t going to go well with the influencers who flock to Stagecoach:

“I knew I wanted to do a one-of-a-kind show, and I knew maybe the worst place for the presentation would have been Stagecoach.

But I also knew that it would have been the biggest megaphone, that there were going to be 30,000 TikTokers who were there to be seen. The show wasn’t for them.

If we did that [performance] as a one-off at [one of Church’s usual] shows, people would have tore their clothes. It would have been a revival. But [at Stagecoach] I knew I was getting a casual thing where they’re wanting to hear “Drink in My Hand,” and they’re wanting to hear what they want to hear. And I’m giving them none of that.”

Of course he’s right. Church played 20+ residency shows at his Nashville bar, Chief’s, and it was pure magic for everyone who was lucky enough to attend. He also recently announced a three night run at Red Rocks Amphitheater next month, with one of those shows being fully acoustic – and it sold out immediately. If Church had done the Stagecoach show for his own crowd, it would have been an instant classic for anyone in attendance and left anyone who wasn’t there jealous that they missed out.

But because it was Stagecoach, a country music festival that’s more about the culture than the music, the crowd didn’t appreciate what they were seeing. They wanted a party, they wanted the hits, they wanted the clips for social media.

What they got, instead, was a magical moment that put the music center stage. And Stagecoach is no place for that.

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