Hey everybody, it's Koolah from three more questions. Today's interview with Eric Church is unbelievable. You're gonna love this episode hearing about how Eric has stayed committed to who he is and stayed committed to his vision, to achieve success, not only as a songwriter, but also as an entrepreneur. Before we get going with the interview though, I also want to tell you that this is the second straight week that David's new book, How Leaders Learn, has hit the USA Today bestseller list. We are so pumped that this book is getting into the hands of leaders everywhere . And if you haven't grabbed your copy of How Leaders Learn, go to Amazon and grab your copy today. If you love the book, which I know you will, be sure to leave a review so that the book gets into the hands of as many people as possible. Grab How Leaders Learn today and enjoy. Welcome to How Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Our guest today is Eric Church, a 10-time Grammy nominee and a CMA Entertainer of the Year. He's one of country music's most respected songwriters and performers, definitely a leader in the industry. And he's also a very successful entrepreneur. Get this. He owns Field and Stream magazine, his own whiskey brand, a bar in downtown Nashville called "Chiefs." And he's even an owner of the NBA franchise, the Charlotte Hornets. But whether he's making music or building brands, one thing is for sure, he commits division. Great leaders have to have the courage of their convictions, win or lose. When you have that vision and really own it, let me tell you, nothing inspires people more. You're about to see how it's done from one of the greats. Plus, Eric's got stories on everyone from Michael Jordan to Taylor Swift. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Eric Church . I want to start by taking you back to the beginning. Tell us a story about your upbringing that shaped the kind of leader that you are today. I grew up in a small town, North Carolina. I mean, a blue collar town, furniture factory kind of town. My grandfather was the chief of police there for 35 years. I had a pretty normal, all-American upbringing. I played sports, went to church with everybody else. I did the whole thing. And I got into music somewhere along that path. But for me, the biggest part of my upbringing was everybody needs a grounding rod. And North Carolina and Granite Falls, North Carolina specifically has always been kind of my grounding rod. And it's always a thing that I go back to as things happen in my life, success, failures. That's always the place that I go back to. I go, "Okay, am I being representative of those people and how I was raised and where I'm from?" Makes sense. And you're also known, Eric, for just going up against the grave, you know, not following the rules, thinking outside the box. Where does that come from? Well, I think a lot of it comes from just your journey. Sometimes the journey defines you and then you react to that definition. And for me, as we started out in music, we tried to do things our own way. I mean, I started at a time when it was a very, I would say, quotation, soccer, mom, based country music scene. And I was doing something pretty masculine at that time. And it was lukewarm received, probably is the best way to say it. But I believed it was right. And then I got crossways with a few tours and rubbed some people the wrong way. But I didn't rub them the wrong way because I was trying to rub them the wrong way. I rubbed them the wrong way because I was trying to be me. And I was trying to be respectful and representative of where I was from and how I was raised. And it's just who I was. Yeah, that streak of that courage, the conviction, which is something that every leader needs to have. Because you know, it's hard to do new things if you don't have the courage to really follow what you believe. To me, it's always been about vision. I mean, there's a lot of people that'll help you along the way. But I always knew the kind of artists I wanted to be, the kind of songs I wanted to write, the kind of records I wanted to make. And I saw that, I heard that. And then you have to have enough conviction in that that everybody else gets on the boat with you and rose the same way. Yeah, I want to ask you about that, Eric, because you talk about what you believed in. What did you want your music and yourself to really stand for? How would you describe the Eric Church brand, so to speak? Well, I think it's unique. I think a lot of times it's against the grain, but it's not against the grain trying to be against the grain. It's just trying to provide a unique perspective creatively that maybe other people aren't providing at the time. I'm a big believer in free speech. And a lot of the things people weren't talking about in music and our first record centers like me, we had a song called Two Pink Lines. It was about teen pregnancy. And that went over exactly like you think it would go over, you know, in the commercial market. And I had another song called Lightning about the death penalty. And those things weren't things that you would normally, if you're a major label and you're trying to make money, those are not songs that you're going to put at the forefront. But that was important to me because it was a perspective. It's what people talk around around their dinner table. And I think what people talk about around their dinner table should be the songs we write, should be the records we make. And I've always wanted to be the guys that I've loved, whether it's Weyland, whether it's Bruce, whether it's Willie Nelson, the guys that are mentors of mine, Bob Dylan, they've always talked about that. And they've never shot away from that. And that's always been my compass. I feel like that every artist has a musical compass. And throughout time, you're going to be challenged of whether or not you follow that compass. And the greatest artists have always followed that compass. And even when other people say, "Go this way, you know where your true north is ." So for me, it really came back to who you are, the perspective, what you want to say and having the vision of the artist you want to be. And you really stuck to your guns on this vision way before you had any commercial success. You just talked about a couple of things that didn't really go over well, your teenage pregnancy song. And how did you stay true to yourself and then ultimately break through? Because you probably didn't have a lot of people rooting for you back then. Well, you have less and less the more failures you had. I think at the end of the day, I was okay with winter lose. This was the hand I wanted to play. And I didn't want to win, not play in my hand, not being true. I think if I look back on it and I had had commercial success doing it another way, it would have bothered me at night when I laid down. And I wanted to win or lose. I'm at least going to do this my way. I'm going to make sure my perspective is involved in this. And I think that that's where the vision comes from. And that's what I see now. I see a lot of young artists. I'm an old guy now, but I see a lot of young artists that they go to TikTok or they go to these things. But they've never really, the way I was brought up is you plug in a guitar, you go on the road, you play 250 shows a year, you play your songs for people. And you walk out there and you do it. You do it the way the stones did it. You do it the way Dylan did it. You do it the way Willie did it. It's a tried and true thing. And technology's great, but there's a lot of shortfalls with technology. So for me, it was always about you got to see that, you got to live that, you got to go through that, you got to react to that creatively. And I think that's something that's defined our career and our position where we are now in music. You know, speaking of reacting, you know, when I was reading about you, I'd learned more and more for this little conversation we'd had here. You know, I found out you had a lot of odd jobs in college. We both like picked up the trash and did all that kind of stuff to get to the school. One of them, you worked at a ski resort. And as I understand it, that actually helped you launch into the music business . You know, tell us that story. It's a good one. I've been fired a lot, David, in my time, but I was in college. I was in a band at the time. We just started a little local band, but picked up a job at Appalachian Ski Mountain. I mean, I did everything. I went from cleaning bathrooms to I worked in the kitchen. Like I learned how to peel a bull dig like you can't believe. I'd feel about 1000 of those things, man. I'm a machine. And then I moved into the ski part and I was adjusting skis, you know, working on people's skis. And one of the days, I probably been out too late the night before playing music. I read the chart wrong and one of the guys that went out, the skis are supposed to pop off when you have an altercation with the mountain and the ski didn't pop off. And the guy got injured and they had to take him out and they came in and looked at who had adjusted his skis. It wasn't me. So I didn't get to work there anymore. From there, I was like, okay, you know, it's like, I feel like, you know, God's telling me at this point in time, you're not meant to be a ski adjuster. You need to go do something else. So I've had that happen many times in my life. You know, as painful as it is in business, sometimes getting fired takes you to a better place. And you said you've been fired a bunch of times and I understand you got fired by rascal flats, which actually turned out to be another good thing for you. And an even better thing for Taylor Swift, maybe. Tell us a story about how that happened. So I was out on the flats tour at that time. That was the biggest touring country music. And the hard thing for me is we were playing bars, we were playing clubs, we get this tour. And the way the flats tour would work is you would play, you know, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. But we would play Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We would have like one day off in these bars and clubs. And we would join their big tour on the weekend. And it just didn't work for me. I mean, we got out there and we had 15 minutes, which I've never done really well with. And it just wasn't a great fit. And I don't do real well. Never have when people started playing more rules to what I'm doing. So it just was a bad fit. I got fired a Madison Square Garden. If you're going to go down, that's the place to go down. And I got irritated that weekend. We had an altercation with the band. And I decided that at Madison Square Garden, I didn't know if I'd ever be back there. So I was going to burn my one chance. And I told the guys, I said, we're not playing 15 minutes tonight. We're playing 40 minutes tonight. And I went out and we played. It was a great show. And I actually read about the next day. They didn't call me. I read about it in the press that I've been replaced by Taylor Swift. So Taylor's great and an interesting part of country music history. Taylor came up after and she was real sweet. She's, I hope there's no hard feelings. I said, no, I said, this crowd is going to be great for you. This is exactly where you should be. I said, all I asked, and she was a brand new artist. Like she had just put her first single out. And I said, all I asked is that I get your first gold record. And honest to God, David, it was like two weeks later. You know, she walks up on the bus. We were playing some festival and she had her first gold record. Yeah, I've said to Eric, thanks for playing too long and too loud on the flats to her. I sincerely appreciate it. Taylor. And it's now, it's now in the country music hall of fame. So she went on to do some pretty good things. But what was interesting about that is that it comes down to perspective. It comes down to vision. That just wasn't what I wanted to be. And we got banished to rock clubs. We got banished to places that nobody wants to be banished to. But what I found there were a lot of people like me that country music wasn't talking to. We would play these rock clubs at 10 o'clock at night. And I saw, you know, 40 or 50 guys. And at that time, it was a very soccer mom driven format. And they're in there listening to classic rock and roll when we would come out and play. And they started to get it. It started to grow. Nobody knew it was growing because it was growing one fan at a time. But it started to kind of grow at that time. And then I got a call from Bob Seger out of the blue, you know, I picked up the phone and his Bob. And I'll never forget it. He goes, he's got this real like raspy, like Michigan, you know, accent. And he goes, Hey, Eric, he goes Bob Seger here. He goes, you really get fired from the flats tour. And I was like, yeah, I did. And he said, yeah, I'd love for you to come out and play with us. And he said, all I can offer you is 45 minutes to open for. And I was like, my first, this time I had one album. My album was 37 minutes long. So I was sitting there going, I'm about to figure out how to extend songs, you know. So it was a lifeline by a guy who's a musical hero of mine. It was like, it's going to be okay. I like what you're doing. Why don't you come out and play in front of our crowds? And that led to a whole different world for us when we saw what that was. So you quickly really realized who you were, what really you wanted to do. And nobody else necessarily wanted to do. And you started developing this personal identity that makes you the Eric Church who are today. What advice can you get leaders on how to grow into their own personal identity ? If you don't have a vision of who you want to be, what you want to be about, what you want to make, what product you want to make. If you don't have that, there's no way for anybody to help you get to that. That's not something you can develop along the way. And for me, I always had a really clear vision of, this is the artist I want to be. These are the songs I want to write, the songs I want to record, and these are how I want to record them. And then these are how I want to play them. And there's a ton of challenges along that way. But that vision, if you have the vision and you have the conviction to that vision, everybody else will get on board and help you get there. And I go back to the Bob Seger's and people like that. It's interesting, business music, it's all the same. It's all about getting to where you want to go. And for me, that has been clear throughout my entire career. If you don't have the vision, you can't expect anybody else to have it for you. I've built everything we've done on that. You know, Eric, first and foremost, you're arguably one of the very best song writers in the world. And I'd like you to tell us a behind the scenes story of how you wrote one of what happens to be one of my favorite songs of yours, which is "Mystress Named Music." You know, walk us through the process of writing a song like that. Initially, the whole "Mystress" understood album, which is my favorite album. It ended up winning an album of the year and all this stuff. But initially, I was going to write that album. And this is really inside baseball. I don't think I've ever told this story. Initially, it was going to be a collaboration album. I had contacted Willie. I had contacted Chris Christoperson. I had contacted Bob Seger, Billy Joel, and all these people. And I said, "Hey, I want to do this album where we get together and we make an album about what we all share, which is this journey in music." And that's really kind of where "Mystress" started, is that's my journey. When you do this for a long enough time, everything else you do is trumped by music. I love my wife. I love my kids. I love everything. But they also have learned over time that music has this siren effect on me. And that's initially what that song was about. And I started with where I grew up in a Baptist church and it starts with, you know, Miss Bessie playing and that feeling of the first time I felt music. And how that has affected my entire life. And it was never a radio single, but it's a song that has been a defining song in my life. And that's another thing, David, that we did really well early on. A lot of artists at that time. And even now, they get on stage and they get insecure in their own art. And they want to play a cover. They want to play somebody else's song. I understand it. That's how you make the crowd cheer. But the more you develop your own art, the more that becomes the thing they'll cheer for down the line. We've done whatever we've done, but we've not had the commercial success. Like a lot of people are surprised. I have some buddies in the industry who are contemporaries now. And I don't have half the number ones they have, right? But when you go to a show, they're going to sing these boots. They're going to sing centers like me. They're going to sing Pledge of Allegiance of the Hag. They're going to sing Mistress Name Music. And none of those songs ever saw radio. So it's about committing to that vision of what you want your path to be. You know, Eric, the thing that strikes me about your lyrics is they're simple, but they're so much complexity in them. You don't have the little sing song anything. I mean, you got your heart and your soul in there. I mean, it's unbelievable. One of the things that I've heard you say is what really matters most is showing your heart. You know, and I think that's something that all leaders need to do is show people their heart. How do you get people to see and feel your heart when you write your songs? Well, you got to know your heart. Yeah, man. That's the first thing. You have to know what you're trying to write about. I think what was interesting for me is I was very fortunate within songwriting. So I came to Nashville, Tennessee in 2000. And I came to the place that all my heroes had came. I went to Broadway and Broadway was where the rhyming was. It was where Tootsie's was. It was where Ernest's record shop was. And what I found out really fast is they didn't want me there. They didn't want original songs. They didn't want my guitar. They didn't want my voice. They didn't want my bartending. They didn't want me there at all. So I had to find my tribe. So I went about three blocks away to this real CD place on Printer's Alley. And who I found there was all the people that got kicked off Broadway just like I did. And they were songwriters that are written for George Jones and Wayland Jennings at Conway 20. And there was this guy one night in the back corner, a little corner booth. And as I walked in this bar, they were like, "Hey, that guy's been doing it for 30 years. He's broke for Wayland. He wrote this song for George Jones. He wrote, "Not a swamped up new kid. You know, introduced myself." And he took a liking to me and he started introducing me to all the old dogs in town. The guys that were really committed to their craft. It wasn't just about writing a song or releasing a song. It was about crafting a song. And even if it never made any commercial success at all, knowing your craft and being the best at your craft and working at that craft allows you a chance to have so much more success. And he introduced me to all these old writers that had been doing it forever. That was my workshop. That was my wood shed. Every day I would go right with these guys. And I got better and I got better and I got better. And I learned that it's not just about sitting down right now. I did. It's about crafting that. It's about understanding the craft of songwriting and understanding the businesses I was in. With the best in the world. And it was invaluable to me to be able to have that time and go in rooms with these guys and learn and watch and be involved in it. And it was the, as I look back on my life and my career, that's the maybe the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Is a lot of new guys now, they skip that process. They go on TikTok. They write a song. It's out. They write. They never go through the craft part. Is this the best that I could write this idea? Is this the best song that it could be? And in those rooms with those guys, they challenged every line. They challenged every idea. They challenged every turn of the phrase. And it taught me how to look at things a different way than I would have if I had taken a different path. Hey, everyone, it's Kula, co-host of Three More Questions. And I have some exciting news to share with you. We just launched a breakthrough app that will help you become a better leader in less than two minutes a day. It's called How Leaders Lead. As you know on the podcast, David spends about an hour each week interviewing some of the top leaders in the world. People like Tom Brady, Condolee is a rice and Jamie Diamond. But we know that leaders like yourself are pressed for time. So we've taken the very best clips from these conversations and put them into an easy to use mobile app that you can learn from in less than two minutes a day. If you want to become a better leader, start a daily leadership habit with the How Leaders Lead app. It's available now for free in the App Store. Download it today. Eric, I got to ask you, how do you get yourself in the right frame of mind and in the right place to really maximize your creativity? That's a great question. I think for me, I try to find every artist, every creative person has muses. And for me, I try to find a location, so I wrote the chief album in North Carolina. I wrote the Missed and Misunderstood album in North Carolina. I wrote the Heart and Soul album, the whole thing in North Carolina. So I try to put myself in a place. That's where it's always been a touchstone or cornerstone for me, where I try to go back and when I look in the mirror, I try to find that kid at 21, 22 years old who was leaving everything behind, secure life, college education, fiance, all these things. What made that kid look in the mirror and go, "Nope, I'm going to Nashville." And I try to put myself in that place of, "I owe it to that kid to make this record." It's really a frame of mind. I write songs all the time. I'm constantly doing it. But when it's time to make a record and time to write a record, I'm in a different mode than I am if I'm just writing songs. Explain that a little bit more for me. Well, so for me, when it's project based, right, if I relate it to business, you have a new product, you have whatever it is, you can stumble across genius all the time. But in my world, one song would be that. It's about developing the idea that's going to allow that song or that thing to flourish. So I have to get in a headspace for that. I've never written a record that I just went, over time went, "Well, I've just got these songs and this will be the record." I've always committed to, "I'm going to write for the next however many months. I'm going to hold up somewhere. I'm going to immerse myself in that headspace, that heartspace, that culture. I'm going to write that record." And if those songs ends up being better than what I had, it'll start to formulate this album, what it is. When I wrote the "Miss Misunderstood" album, the first song I wrote was "Miss Misunderstood." And I didn't have a concept until I wrote that song. The second song I wrote was "Knives a New Orleans." And I knew that I had "Miss Misunderstood" and I had "Knives a New Orleans." And I had a pretty good feel to play between the two of what I thought this record could be. So I had my anchors, I had my bookends. And it started to formulate what an album is. I think a lot of guys now, and it's a mistake in music. They don't know they're making a mistake yet, but they are. You have to make albums. Nothing has changed. I read a ton of books. I don't understand what the author of the book is trying to do by reading one chapter of that book. You've got to read the whole book. And that's the way I look at records. You can have a great song, chapter one, chapter five, whatever, but you don't understand the writer unless you read the whole book. So we have built our entire career on album-based stuff and writing albums and making albums. That's very interesting. You're so creative, this may have never been a problem for you, Eric, but have you ever gotten into a creative lull where it just wasn't coming? And did you have any panic set in when that happened? A lot of mine comes from after I go through the record-making process, when I commit myself to an album and I'll commit it time-wise and everything. After that, I don't write songs for a while. I usually get away from it. Like all of a sudden I gave all I can give soul-wise. I guess you just clean it out mentally. I don't ever get freaked out. I've had a couple of times where I was like, "All right, here we go. Come to me." But the best thing there is I just listen to a lot of albums. I go back and I've always been a guy that if I'm a Bob Seager fan and I am, I want to know who Bob Seager was a fan of. So I'll go back to the older stuff and then I'll chase it back to the older stuff. And you end up chasing your way back on this chain of stuff that inspired them that will end up- I've always had it inspire me when chasing it back that way. Just being a student of the craft, it's being a student of the history of the craft. And that applies to everything. That doesn't just apply to music. That's everything. And when you have that commitment to it, it ends up usually working out in your favor. You can't even agree more. And you've got a marketing degree and you are a real marker, no question about it. You never worked at Procter & Gamble. You didn't have to. You just are a marketing. You've got to do phones. I would have got a hard day. Eric, I have worked with a lot of creative people over the years and advertising agencies and different kinds of people that really had to bring forward that creative product. And you find the best of the best. They make your bones. They certainly made mine. There's no question about that. But I've learned that when you deal with really creative people like yourself, letting go of their baby is really hard. This is their baby. They see it. This is how I see it. This is the way how it needs to be. And it's very difficult at times to receive any kind of suggestions or feedback . How do you feel about your ability to get feedback? Or do you even want it? I think you've got to qualify that with who you're getting feedback from. And if you're getting feedback from people that you respect, because I think a lot of people, they get sideways in whatever they're doing. And then they're a little bit desperate and they'll just take feedback. Feedback when you have vision is a very dangerous thing because visions that supersede feedback, you should use the feedback to help develop division. If you don't have the vision, that feedback can send you down some really, really, really bad roads. And I think that for me, it all comes back to vision. If you know who you want to be, win or lose, by the way. That's the key. That's the hard part. You have to be okay if your vision didn't succeed. I've had that happen. We've all had that happen. You have to be committed to that vision, regardless of the feedback. Or there's no other way for anybody to help you along this journey. And specifically in my world with fans. The fans won't perspective. Fans won't a unique way to look at something. They can listen to anything. There's music everywhere. You have to be able to provide something that's a unique perspective that you 're committed to. Even when the whole world is beating the hell out of you, you have to be able to look back and know, "Oh, that's who I want to be. That's where I want to go. If I lose fans on that, that's fine. That's still my vision." I think a lot of that is just the conviction in that, which is probably the hardest thing to do and music, business, anything is being committed to that conviction. When I was growing up, artists would put their very best songs on the A side of the vinyl. But I've found, interestingly with you, some of your biggest hits are deeper into the record. Is that that storytelling of the album driving that? What's your thinking on that? It goes back to writing the whole book. I know the world's changed a lot. I will never not make an album that I can show you in that album where I was in my life. I can show you the change from centers like me to Carolina, to chief, to outsiders, to mischievous understood, a desperate man. I can show you, "You can hear the change in me. You can feel me age. You can see when I get married. You can feel the kids. You can feel the challenges. You can feel those things. The triumphs. You can feel all that if you put it all on and you listen to it. That discography is so important musically that you can go back and look at that and put that on a shelf. I always gauge myself with, I have eight or ten guys that are my Mount Rushmore guys, right? Girls. I would be proud to at least put my record up somewhere on that wall or don't make that album. For me, it's always been about seeing what that piece was in this part of my life and being okay with maybe you don't have the number ones on it that the label wants you to have or people want you to have. But those don't matter as much. The people matter. The people in front of you matter. The consumption matters. It doesn't matter whether or not radio can play it. It doesn't matter whether the label likes it. It matters what the people think. When you go out and play that song, I had a young artist recently that thought we never released these boots and it was a song of our first album. I can't get out of many shows. If I don't play these boots, they'll riot. These boots was never a song for us. I had a young artist that was like, "How many weeks was that a number one song ?" It wasn't even a single. In his mind, as a young artist, he came to shows, he thought that was one of our biggest songs. It was never that way commercially, but it was that way to the fans. It was that way on consumption. I think that a lot of people, they lose their way a little bit because they'll look at metrics. Metrics matter. If you don't have the vision to see past the metrics, you're going to lose yourself in that process. That's where the feedback comes in. You got to see where you want to be at the end and you got to set a path to go there. Most people don't really understand the business side of music. Could you give us an overview of the business model and how musicians make a living these days? How long is this podcast? Yeah. Give us the cliff notes. The hard thing is you have multi-faceted. You have the songwriting side, the creator part. They make a fraction of what they should make. They write with an artist or they don't write with an artist. An artist splits that with a record label, who splits that with a publishing company, who splits that with then performing rights company. What it really comes down to is if you're the songwriter, which is what I came to town to be, it gets split a lot. That egg gets divided up a lot of different ways. I still think it comes down from my part as the world changes. Technology is not a bad thing. It allows more people access to music, which is a good thing. It removes some of the gatekeepers, right? The downside is I see a lot of young artists today and I voice this and I believe this. They'll write a song on a Tuesday and they'll put it on TikTok on a Wednesday and they'll write a song on a Friday and they'll put it on TikTok on a Saturday. Song could be great, but I don't know you any more than I did before unless I know how to get to know you, which is to put in an album and go that way. I think for me from a music standpoint, it's a complicated business. It's a rough business, but it still goes down to if you're a young artist and you know who you are, the kind of music you want to make, there's a lot of people out there and a lot of assets that will help you make that if you know the music you want to make. You have your own publishing company and I'm wondering, it's a tough business as you just described. How are you making your publishing companies stand out from every other publishing company on Music Row? You and I both know there are a lot of them. Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to the songwriter. I've never chased a songwriter that I thought was the commercial songwriter. When I evaluate a songwriter, it's just like when I learned, can you craft a song? Regardless of whether it goes number one, is that a great song? Did you turn every lyric the right way? Did you think about how that hook hits? Did you think about that chorus? Did you write it the way when I listened to Chris Christofferson album? There's not a line in any of Chris Christofferson's albums that you don't go, damn, you know, I mean, it's written to the wall and that's the way I evaluate a songwriter. Just write it to the wall. And if you do that, you're going to have some things that work or don't. I'm okay either way, but the songwriters that we have, that's the way that we evaluate a songwriter. We've turned down some songwriters that have went on to be massive. It would have made us a bunch of money, but it's just not the kind of place we wanted to be and what we wanted to be about for what our publishing company was. So again, it goes back to David. I've said it a lot. You've got to be able to execute that. You know, I want to shift gears now to some of your other business interests. There's a lot more now. There used to be. I know, I know that. And they say you can learn a lot about a person on the golf course. And I've kind of gotten a glimpse of your business mind and how you think through things. And tell everybody why you're so excited about your acquisition of the Field and Stream brand. Well, so I grew up when I was a younger man, my grandfather, some of my greatest memories with my mom's dad was he had this old white, late 60s Chevy pickup truck. And this is like back before you had to buckle up. It had the bench seat in the front and he had eight or 10 Field and Stream magazines that were just, they had rolled up and weathered and he would just stick them around. This is no cell phones back then, right? So when we would be on a break fishing and we'd be eating lunch in the truck, I would read those Field and Streams. And I read those articles. I knew them by heart because for whatever reason, those are the ones we had in the truck. So that became my Bible growing up Field and Stream magazine. And when it had the chance within the last year to purchase Field and Stream. And here's the thing for that for me. It's an American icon. It's been around since the 1800s, 1871. And to be able to have a chance at that and bring that back to what it was for me when I was 10 years old in a pickup truck was the most exciting thing because I wanted to see that be that for future generations. We're running away from a lot of magazines now. It's all online. Everything's closing up shop. And one of the first things I said when we purchased Field and Stream was I don 't care what it costs. We're going to put a Field and Stream magazine out. We're going to have something that you can hold. You can read. You can put in a truck. You can put on a coffee table, whatever. We're going to have that or I'm not interested. And we talked about what it meant not only the outdoor space, but to America. I mean, it's one of America's oldest brands. And to be able to have a chance at that was just a stroke of good luck and good fortune. And it's been a ton of fun. I mean, we're new at it, but it's doing really well and it's going to do really well. So it's something that I'm committed to making sure we get it to where we need to get it to. And once again, thinking against the grain, I'm going to get that physical property in people's homes and in their pickup trucks, that magazine. I think that's fantastic. David, I also thought, I mean, when everybody else is running away from it, I mean, that's always been a thing. I'm always the first one to the fire. So as they were leaving the space, you know, a lot of people are going back to your taking in people who give you analysis. And their analysis is always well, everybody's getting out of this space. And that's the first space I like to be in. So I said, well, I said, everybody's getting out. We should get in, you know, because nobody else is in that space. You're also in the whiskey business and you launched this whiskey gypsy. And again, this is a very, very crowded category. How are you applying your creativity here to win? Same thing. It was when we did this, I was like, I'm not interested in just a bourbon or whiskey, right? I said, if we can be creative with each release of this, where we go in like this, this newest release, because I'm from North Carolina, we aged everything in Appalachian Oak , which is from right where I'm from. I said, if we can take every one of these releases, I'm not interested in one release. I said, if we can take each of these releases and be creative with them and make them very good, but give them a story, almost like an album, first one's an album, second one's an album, third one's an album. And there's a through line there that interests me. Otherwise, I'm not interested, you know. So I think that a lot of that was just being able to have the creative vision to go. This is what separates this from all the other stuff that's going on. And then you've become a recent owner of the Charlotte Hornets and how'd that come about and what do you bring to the party there? My sport was basketball, I played basketball, I was a pretty good basketball player. I'm a Tar Heel, so I was a Tar Heel fan growing up and the Charlotte Hornets came in the late 80s to Charlotte and the first time we had an NBA team and I was a big fan early on. And I actually got into that through Michael Jordan. I got to know MJ a little bit and when MJ started trying to get out, he called and he was like, "Hey, you know, a lot of this ownership group is not North Carolina based, they're not local and I want to make sure we have a feel there." First of all, it's a frightening call when MJ calls you. And I never thought about a pro team and frankly was terrified when he said, "I want you to do this." I was like, "Oh shit, you know, what does this mean?" But after talking to MJ and after talking about, he's a North Carolina kid, we 're both Tar Heels and he talked about how important it was to have local ownership, I thought about it. And then I stretched a little bit from what I could do. I think we all do that sometimes financially, but I thought, "You know, I like this. I like that it back to my touchstone, back to the cornerstone of what North Carolina means to me. I like it. I like it for the journey." So I did it. I joined the ownership group. I liked their vision. I liked where they're trying to go. When I was young, just Charlotte Colosseum at that time before they built the new arena was rocking when the Hornets were there. And I got two young boys and it's been fun to take them to games and do it. I do some of that. So it was just an opportunity that came that I wouldn't have got to look at if it wouldn't have been for MJ and the relationship that we had. So I said, "Yes." And that's been a whole different journey, but I love journeys. Yeah. And you're bringing the North Carolina, what you bring, that passion that you have for the state to the franchise as well, which makes a ton of sense. Michael Jordan, he's the goat. I mean, there's no doubt about it. How have you learned just by getting to know him as a friend that's inspired you? He's a perfectionist in a lot of ways. A lot of people don't realize that. He's committed to whatever craft he's doing, whether it's golf or tequila or basketball. And he's a perfectionist. And I think that a lot of people wouldn't think that about MJ. But his commitment to whatever he's doing is 110%. There's no other there. And we open our Chiefs bar in Nashville. And he committed to coming up and hanging out with us for our first night there . And it's been a thing for me being growing up. And I'm a editorial growing up North Carolina, Michael Jordan is, he's a defining figure for a lot of people in the world. But it was a really defining figure of excellence for me when I was a young man . And to have him involved in some of the stuff that we're doing when we're trying to do the same thing, we're committed to excellence. We're committed to being different than everybody else to have him support that has been just a dream come true for a Carol, a Granite Falls North Carolina boy. About a month ago, I was at that same opening, Eric, you know, that MJ was was that. And I didn't have anybody coming up and asking me for any autographs or anything like that. But that night I didn't need it. But I'll tell you what, Chiefs is an incredible, incredible experience and an incredible space. And you say it's storytelling through space. Tell us about it. Ben Whippern, who's my partner there, who's my best friend in the world, who's the greatest person in the world, in my opinion, at telling stories through real estate. Ben's still a young man, but he is the best at it in the world. And I've seen a ton of them. And I was always wary about getting into that world. There's a lot of other artists, Broadway, Nashville. I was never interested unless I could do it my way. And the way that I want to do it is you're committed to, there's got to be a venue there that young songwriters can play, young artists can play, young musicians can play, people that when I came to Broadway and I wasn't allowed to be there, I want those people to be allowed there. So I said, we may not be built like the other bars are where it's all about, let's serve as much alcohol as we can serve and make as much money. That wasn't the way that we did this. It needs to be a place that's going to be there 50 years, not five. And Ben and I went in and instead of doing a lot of the bars down there are licensed deals with artists. We bought the building and we brick by brick, we built that building to division of what I wanted chiefs to be and define for future artists. My favorite thing right now is two or three days a week and what we call the neon steeple, which is our venue, which separates us from everything there. It's like a mini rhyming. It's all wood. We have young artists come in out of Texas, out of California, out of whatever and they get to come play Nashville on Broadway and sell tickets and do what they do, show who they are. They're original music. They're not playing Brown Eyed Girl. They're not playing Sweet Home, Alabama. They're coming in and playing who they are. And that was what I wanted this whole thing to be with chiefs. And it's been one of the greatest things that I've done creatively and successfully is doing really well. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Eric Church in just a moment. When Eric wanted to open his music venue, chiefs, he only wanted to partner with Ben Weppern, the CEO of AJ Capital and the founder of Graduate Hotels. That's because Eric believes and I have to agree with him. Nobody understands the power of storytelling and business quite like Ben. We're mission driven. We're going to execute this business plan that doesn't have any comps. We're building something that's in the future. You have to be able to believe my story or you're not going to invest in that being part of that journey. And so the story is everything. And you think about a songwriter. I mean, the writing of the song is then comes into life. They manifest that through the chords and the lyrics and the person singing. We do the same thing, but in physical space. So we're telling that story. And hopefully people connect it. And some people won't. A lot of people think, I'm out of my mind or they think that this product, this looks like a living room. And I'm like, well, that's great because what we're doing is not for everybody. All of those obstacles or opportunities and work clothes, that's okay. We want to build something that's differentiated and to be differentiated is actually very difficult. One, it's hard to bring it to life. And then two, it's not for everyone. That's okay because the people that like it will really resonate with us. Listen to Ben's episode and see how to put storytelling to work for your organization. It's episode 143 here on Howl Eaters Lead. You know, in the music world, you've become a superstar by seemingly not caring too much about the commercial nature of what you're doing or making a ton of money. Has that perspective changed as you stepped into these other business ventures? I'm not saying for music, but when you think about these other ventures, how much is the making money a big part of what drives you? I don't think you ever make money unless you're committed to the vision and the commitment of what you're doing. That doesn't happen. You know, so I think for me, you don't go into it going, we're going to make a lot of money. You go into it committed to the idea and the vision of what you want it to be. And sometimes you make money and sometimes you don't. But if you don't have that as your cornerstone, you're never going to make money. So I think for me, win or lose, you have to have, this is what I want it to be. This is what I see. This is what I get my heart behind. And if it wins, it wins. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I can lay down at night and be okay to wait. I think that the things that always make money are the things that you love, things you enjoy doing, things you think about when you go to bed, things you think about when you wake up and you don't think about them because of how much money you can make. You think about them because that's what you love doing. And that's how music's been for me and every business venture that we've done outside of music, I've always kept that as the main cornerstone of this is how I want to do it. And if it works, it works. If it doesn't, that's okay too. Being focused on your customers is critical in business. And you're very focused on building your fan base, the Eric Church fan base. And I've heard you say about your songs, they're mine until I release them and then they're not mine anymore. You know, who's do they become? They become theirs. They become the fan. I mean, my favorite time with an album is the night before release. And for every album I've ever made, I get in my car, I put the CD in and I drive around. And that's the last night that those songs are mine. Because the next day, they're not mine anymore. They're everybody else's. We did that the night we opened chiefs, the same thing. The night before you were there, the night before we opened, I went down with Ben, my wife, his wife. We were the only four people there because that's the last night that it was ours. And the next day when we opened those doors, it didn't become about my story anymore. It became about their story. And the memories they make there. And I think that's exactly what, I mean, that's what fires me up. I love those little small moments that you know when you walk out of that place or you know when that album's done. That's it. Tomorrow morning, it's theirs to go be the soundtrack of their life, right? It's theirs to go play. It's no longer mine. I've lost my time with it. Where my story ends, theirs begins. And that's the best thing about music. Yeah, that story about you and Ben and your wife's. That gives you goose puffs, you know. You talk about the importance of being left footed and never wanting your fans to know what's coming. Give me a, for instance, of how you make that happen. Well, we've done that a lot in our career. We're about to do it again. By the time this airs, it'll, it'll have happened, but we're going out to play stage coach, which is a big thing in California. It's 80,000 tickets. It's one of the bigger shows that the festival kind of show. And this particular year, just to give you an inside baseball of this, but I've done it seven times. I've headlined it five times. As I get older, they were saying all these acts that are before us and it's, you know, all these rock and roll, rock and roll, fire, cannons, you know, all this stuff , all this noise. And so my idea was I want to go back to the cornerstone kind of foundation where I started. So I'm going to go to stage coach breaking news here myself with an acoustic guitar and a 40 person choir for 90 minutes. And I'm going to sit there and I'm going to play. We're going to do all spiritual stuff. We're going to do a bunch of covers. I'm going to work my songs into it, but we're not going to stop for 90 minutes. I'm going to play with a choir. It's going to take it back to kind of where music is, but it's the antithesis of what everybody out there is trying to do. They're trying to be bigger, bold or fire, rock and roll, you know, and my thing was it, that's not, doesn't have to be that way. So I'm going to go out and I'm going to do just an acoustic guitar and a choir. So we've done that a lot in our career, but I've always found that that perspective of taking it back to where it started, back to when I talked about earlier about chasing who Bob Seger loves, who Springsteen loves, who Willie Nelson loves, you chase it back to the origin. The origin of all that is still the purest form of it. And we don't do that as much anymore. So I'm going to, by the time this airs, this could have been a really horrible mistake, but it feels good right now to go back and just take a choir and do it. So, Eric, you have a hell of a good time just disrupting yourself, don't you? Yeah, I love it. You know, I think honestly, boredom is the biggest thing, you know, when you have success, it's really easy just to continue to show up and do what you do. And, you know, it's just it gets stagnant. It gets, I think if you're not challenging yourself, I don't care what business you're in. If you're not excited about what you're about to do by pushing boundaries, you are not doing what you should do for your craft, for your business, for your art. And I think for me, it's always been something with records, with performances. I've always been the one that's like, let's do something really, really strange and weird and take a chance. Sometimes it doesn't work, but it's okay if you're living on that edge because that edge, that cutting edge is where all the new guys are going to gravitate to anyway. So if you can always challenge yourself that way, it always cuts sharper than any other edge. You think you're the way I came up with music and all those failures, maybe or not failures, just the difficulty of all that just allows you to live with it more? Yeah, I actually, I think those failures are just critical. You're going to fail a lot, you know, but as long as you're failing with the right mission in mind, with the right vision in mind, it's why you fail is the thing. If you're failing because you're taking chances, that's worth failing for. And I think with anything you do, if you're really putting yourself out there and it's got to come from here, the thing where this gets complicated is, you know, people will come in and go, you should take a chance here because that's what you should do for your career. No, it's got to come from here. You got to know that this is what we should do because you believe it, because you feel it. And if you do that, it's worked out more often than not, at least for me. You know, Eric, this has been so much fun and I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions with you. Are you ready for this? I'm ready. Three words that best describe you. Convicted, passionate, spiritual. What's the one word that best describes your wife, Catherine? Devoted. What's the one word that best describes the relationship your two sons have with you? I hope it's respectful, but I hope it's also loving. I mean, I come from a generation where I got to tell my kids every day, you know, we pray in the morning when they go to school and I tell them I love them. And that's something that I think is important in the stand-top. If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be and why? One person I would probably be, I always go as musical for me, but I would probably be Willie Nelson because I just want to see what that day looks like. Okay. What's your biggest pet peeves? I think my biggest pet peeve is the lack of, I'm a passion guy. So when people do things and they don't have that element of passion, whether it's sports or music or whatever, that really annoys me, you know, that they're just kind of going through the motions of it. That's an annoying thing for me. Who would play you in a movie? Not Morgan Wallens. I would say, who's a good buddy of mine? I would say, well, I'd say another good guy who's really good actor. He's a friend of mine, Matthew McConaughey. I would love to see how he does that. Well, he's a hell of a lot better looking than you though. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Your favorite memory on stage? My favorite memory is probably, I've had a bunch of them. I'll give you three. So I got a chance a few years ago to play with Chris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. And we did three or four songs together and just what those guys have meant to me and to be on stage with them. It was acoustic. So it was the three, that's the acoustic guitars. The other one would probably be, I played the last show George Strait did at Dallas Stadium or Jerry World there when he did his retirement tour. We played a couple songs together. And then my top one, I got a chance to play with Springsteen. We did, working on a highway, two acoustic guitars. And we just went out and played the song at a benefit thing for him, Madison Square Garden. That was something. That was great. What's the favorite song you just love to perform? I mean, centers like me is something that I don't perform all the time that I really I like doing. And it's something that's always special for me. That one and hold my own is the other one because it's one of my favorite songs . It talks about kind of where I am with my life at that time and still am at this point in time. So those are the two. Your dream concert venue? I've already played, Red Rocks. Red Rocks is the best in the world. And I've never been to a place like that and played a place like that. So that will forever be my favorite. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? Right now you hear sports talk. But you're normally here. I go off my phone a lot. So I'm not using as much like I do some satellite radio stuff, but I'm usually listening to what's on my phone and stuff that I grew up with. How much do you listen to your own records? Never. Very little. What's something about you few people would know? I'm actually pretty funny. I don't do a lot of interviews. I just never have. I don't do interviews because a lot of people do them. And I'm pretty reclusive in that way. I kind of try to let my music talk. But one of the things that's been interesting about the chief shows because we restricted when I do the residency shows there, there's no cell phones. So I get to tell stories that I've had in my career that nobody, I wouldn't want that on the internet. So I get to tell things and some funny stuff that's happened with other artists that I think people will be surprised with. So if you get to those shows, you get to hear some stuff that I'm not allowed to tell outside that room. All right. That's the end of the lightning round. I just got a few more questions and I'll let you go. You spoke about gun control after the Las Vegas shooting and you received a ton of criticism. What did you learn as a leader from that experience? Well, it still goes back to conviction for me. I was a part of the Vegas show, which is now the deadliest mass shooting in US history. And to be there and to have some fans that died there, we had a number of fans, church choir members that were buried in their choir shirts when they were buried. So I learned that everybody's going to have a perspective on that. But for me, I thought it was the right time to go, hey, we should think about this. This is not, I understand you get to political lines. I get it, but I'm going to tell you my thought on that. I'm going to tell you what I believe on that. One of the most interesting parts of that, David, not a lot of people knows the next show we had after I did that in Rolling Stone was at Sturgis, the Biker Festival in South Dakota. And I had a lot of people going, man, you can't walk out there on stage and St urgis. You know, you got people on bikes, there'll be a lot of NRA hats and all this stuff. And I said, I can't not walk out there. You know, so it was one of those shows that you really learned about your conviction when you walk out there in that setting. You got a lot of bikers, a lot of guys, it just heard what you said. But I was like, hey, this is what I believe is what I think, you know, and I walked out there and played the show. It was a little nervy at first, but you know, it was something I believed in. I think that with music or with life, right? If you believe something, you're convicted by something. I don't believe you should just not say that because you're worried about the consequences of it. I think that if that's what you think, then you should say it and let the chips fall where they may. You know, the up and coming stars in the music world today, they, I'm told they literally worship the ground that you walk on and they often come to you and ask for advice. What do you tell them about how to be successful in a star driven celebrity, heady world that you live in? It's, you got everything coming at you, you know, money, everything you can imagine is there. What do you tell these young artists like Morgan Welling and, you know, you pick the guy? The big thing I still come back to is I always go back to the album part of it, you know, and I go back to what we talked about earlier. And I was like, if you want people to learn who you are, you can't do that song by song. You know, you got to figure out and release an album and put out a piece of art , a piece of work that defines this point in your life. I've said that to everyone who's ever asked, you know, advice of me is it's always worked for me. It's always worked for all my heroes and all the people that I, you know, look up to. So I know technology has changed things, but that's still the core. I give them a lot of advice, but that's still the core advice that I try to give them. You know, over a decade ago, you and your wife, Catherine, started the Chiefs C ares Fund. Tell us about it and why you're passionate about giving back in this way. Yeah, it's a Christian based fund. I mean, what I loved about it is, you know, in the world we live in, there's a very organized way to give money. And you can do it church based and they'll build a new door on the front of the church. And it's never really intrigued me. I wanted to see the money working. We do a lot of stuff overseas. We do a lot of stuff in Nepal. We do a lot of stuff in Asia. And the biggest thing for me with giving like this, I want to see that action able and actually affect people and affect their lives. So we've created a fund there that that's its mission statement is we try to make sure that the money that we give is actually going to people that can benefit from that. You know, I understand that your wife, Catherine worked in the music publishing business when you all first met. What kind of role has she played in your career the past 15 years? And when I first came to town, she was one of the top music publishers. I mean, she was the one you would try to get a medium with to be a songwriter. So she's been invaluable over time just from her knowledge of songs and song writing and the craft of it. Her compass is really, really, really strong. So a number of times that I go to her and go, Hey, I got a weird idea here. How does this hit you? I would not be where I am the day if she didn't have that compass and be able to have that conversation about where we're heading and where we're going. You've accomplished so much, Eric, and you have your hand in so many things now . It's so exciting. What do you see as your unfinished business? I think a lot of it is vision for where the format can go. I mean, you get to a certain, you have a certain success level in anything you do, whether it's business or music. And you've been given an incredible and very lucky opportunity to get to do that and to be a voice for it. I think it's about showing the next generation, the same things that I was shown. When I made my albums and I played my shows and it's paying homage to the same guys that I look at as my heroes. And I think that we always have to go back to that touchstone of the rhyming mother church of what country music is of the storytelling of our relationship within that storytelling with our fans. It's something that I want to make sure we don't lose touch with. I get that times change. I get that music changes, but you still need to have people that are going, no, this is still the way it should be done. Last question. What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone who wants to be a better leader? We've already done it a bunch. Number one thing is vision and your conviction to that vision is going to define whether or not you're a good leader, you're not a good leader because there's going to be times that people challenge that. There's going to be times that you don't have success. And if you don't continue to have that conviction to the vision, then you're not going to be able to lead them through the rough times or the times when that's very challenging. I think if you see the end result, you know where you want to get, it's never going to be this way. It's going to be this way. And I think that by having that vision of seeing the end result is the best thing any leader can possess. Eric, I got to tell you, I've loved this conversation. I knew I would. I always lost spend time with you. You are a hell of a leader. It's easy to see why you've separated yourself in such a competitive field. You're the real deal. And I thank you very much for taking the time to be with me. Thanks for having me, David. I appreciate it very much. Boy, you really can't miss the big idea in this conversation. Eric's commitment to vision in whatever he's doing comes through loud and clear . He thinks it's the single most important thing that a leader can have. And that makes this a big learning opportunity for you today. It's your job as a leader to give people a clear vision, something that will ignite their hearts and minds and get them excited about the future. But let me tell you, it all starts with you. If you're not fully committed to the vision, why would anyone else be? When you are though, it is powerful. It's a booster that will help you overcome big obstacles and do incredible things together. This week, I want you to consider the power of vision. One of the things we've done at How Leaders Lead is create a free new app. It's called How Leaders Lead, not surprisingly. And we've created a playlist on this app that you can go to that will help you really think about vision and learn about vision in the right way. It features insights about vision from the very best leaders. So what I want you to do is download the app if you haven't already and head to the playlist section. Then just hit play on the vision playlist and start learning. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we've learned today is that great leaders are committed to vision. Coming up next on How Leaders Lead is our best of quarter two episode where we play back some of the best content from the podcast the past three months. Like this insight from the CEOs of Warby Parker. Strategies what you say no to, that's something that we've really taken to heart and often counsel other entrepreneurs, other founders that it can become so tempting to chase shiny objects. And yeah, I think the advice would be to really define who you are and maintain ruthless focus just on that and say no to everything else. So be sure to come back again next week to hear the entire episode. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I may get a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]