Last year in Nashville, over 23 performances, Eric Church used the then-unreleased song “Johnny” as the climax of his one-man show To Beat the Devil, pairing it with one of the most viscerally moving and well-kept live surprises ever seen in Music City. We’re still hesitant to spoil it here, but it involved a choir that materialized seemingly out of nowhere to help send “Johnny” to the heavens.
On Friday, Church officially unveiled the studio version of that song — along with the rest of his stellar brand-new album, Evangeline vs. the Machine — and it’s every bit as moving on record as it was in the live setting. The title refers to the fiddle-playing hero of the Charlie Daniels Band’s 1979 staple “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” whom Church implores to return and vanquish a new devil that is menacing not just Georgia, but the entire world. We’re in an age where “machines control the people/and the people shoot at kids,” Church sings to “Johnny,” “so run get your fiddle bow and send him to hell again.”
It’s a risky premise, and in lesser hands the song could have been a corny disaster. But Church, who was profoundly affected by the 2023 Covenant school shooting in Nashville, imbues a real fear of what’s possibly around the corner in today’s cruel world. “We’re hanging by a thread,” he cries, before gritting his teeth in a near spit and demanding Johnny “put on your rattlesnake boots/and crush that serpent’s head.”
“Johnny” also succeeds because Church is so well-acquainted with Daniels’ ur-text, off the CDB’s Million Mile Reflections. He weaves in a number of callbacks to the original, like “fire on the mountain” and “run boys run,” along with a bridge that flips Daniels’ original on its head. Where Daniels’ lyrics reassured us that the dog won’t snarl (“Granny, does your dog bite? No, child, no”), Church’s answers, “These days? Yes.” Then he draws out the word “child” into six-plus syllables as the choir rumbles behind him. It’s fire, brimstone, and, if we’re lucky, salvation.
Church is set to perform Evangeline vs. the Machine in full during some special shows in Nashville, London, and at Colorado’s Red Rocks, before launching his Free the Machine Tour in the fall.
