Eric Church on Grief, Grace, and Faith

The year country music superstar Eric Church turned 40, he survived a life-threatening blood clot and headlined a Las Vegas music festival that two days later became the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Months later, his brother Brandon died. In this revealing conversation, Eric tells Anderson how these events changed him, as a man and a father, and how he copes with the trauma left behind. For more of “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” visit cnn.com/allthereis. Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams, Madeleine Thompson Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome to All There Is. I took a couple of days off with my kids at a beach this past week, and while I was away, it was reported that I've decided to leave CBS's 60 Minutes, where I've worked part-time for the last nearly 20 years. I was caught by surprise that the story leaked out. I was at a water park with my kids, and I quickly typed out a few lines about why I decided to leave. And what I said was that I've been able to balance both jobs for a long time, but now that I have little kids, I just need to work less. "I want to spend as much time with them as possible," I wrote, "while they still want to spend time with me." And that is very true. David Letterman famously said that after leaving his long-running talk show, "If you retire to spend more time with your

• 0:43Anderson Cooper?

  family, check with your family first." Well, I did, and my kids definitely liked the idea of me being around more. A friend of mine, actually a cameraman at 60 Minutes, recently told me that he remembers the moment when his seven-year-old son stopped holding his hand. They were walking to school together, and his son just slipped his hand out of his dad's. My friend didn't think anything of it in that moment, but soon realized that was the last time his son would ever reach out to hold his hand again. I haven't been able to get that story out of my mind. My kids still love holding my hand, or at least they still seem willing to let me hold theirs. That's not going to last forever, and I've already missed out on too much.

• 1:27Anderson Cooper?

  My guest today is also the dad of two boys. He's singer-songwriter Eric Church. He's had an incredible career in music. He started writing songs when he was 13 and first played at the Grand Ole Opry in 2006. Eric is 48 now, with a long list of hits under his belt. His latest album, Evangeline vs. the Machine, is available now, and you can see him live on tour this year. But Eric also knows loss. In June 2017, Eric had a nearly fatal blood clot in his chest and was rushed into surgery, which saved his life. That September, he headlined on the opening night of the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. Two days later, a gunman opened fire into the crowd in what became the deadliest mass shooting

• 2:11Anderson Cooper?

  by a single gunman in U.S. history. 60 people were killed there, and more than 400 were wounded. The following June, Eric's 36-year-old brother, Brandon, died. I sat down with Eric last week in New York, and you'll hear from him right after this break.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Before we get into the show, here's something worth your time. Every day, animals across the country face abuse, neglect, and cruelty. And every day, the ASPCA shows up. They rescue animals in crisis and provide lifesaving medical care. They help animals recover, and they give them the second chance they deserve. But they can't do it alone. Every rescue, every medical treatment, every safe place to heal depends on people who choose to help. If you'd like to be part of that work, visit aspc.org/need. Become a monthly donor today, and you'll help support these lifesaving rescue efforts

• 3:12Speaker 01

  and provide the care, shelter, and love these animals urgently need. And for a limited time, the ASPCA will send you a free gift as a special thank you. Again, that's aspc.org/need.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  My guest today is Eric Church.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  The thing about grief and loss to me is it feels so lonely, and yet is this bond that everybody has that we share with everybody else on the planet. Yep. And you and I share a bond, and I'm not even sure if you... I do know this. You do know this. I did an interview with a woman... Heather Milton. Heather Milton, whose husband Sonny was murdered in Las Vegas. This was just in the immediately after the killings.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Do you want to talk about that night at all?

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's horrifically vivid. We were having such a good time.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Going to concerts was your thing?

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, we love going to concerts. We did it. Every single month, we went to at least one concert.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  You're wearing his favorite concert.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Eric Church was his guy. And we came to Vegas to see Eric Church. And actually, we have tickets to go tomorrow night to see him in Nashville.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Good.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  And we were having a great time.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  How do you deal with this? And I've talked to people in the past who say sometimes it's minute by minute, second by second.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that's where you have to start, the second by second. You know? I cannot imagine my life without him.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  I'm not really sure how you do that. Because it's not something you learn in life. Like you don't just learn to start tying your shoes and then you know, or riding a bike. You're never prepared for something like this.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Somebody send you that interview?

• 5:16Speaker 04

  It's, I've not seen that since it happened. I had played Friday and the shooting was on a Sunday. And that following Tuesday, I was playing the Grand Ole Opry. Somebody sent me that right after the, the, the shooting had happened. And it was such a, um, something broke in me when, when that happened. On stage was always this place that, for all my life, that I could go and whatever was happening in my personal life or anything, I could go on stage. And I had that moment of communion, um, with the fans and, and the spirit moves and we give it to each other back and forth. And that was safe for me. And it never occurred to me

• 5:57Speaker 04

  that there could be any way for that to not be safe. And after, after Vegas happened, those bullets shattered that safety. And it, it was something broke in me. And I got sent that right after it happened. And that interview was really the impetus for what happened on the Grand Ole Opry. I wrote a song called Why Not Me? Um, because you go through this moment of, okay, I played Friday and this happened Sunday. Why didn't it happen Friday? And you go through, it could have been me, right? And just to see the people on Friday night and to see how they were so full of life. They, they were into every song.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  And I even walked down off the stage and walked all the way out to my sound guy in the middle of the crowd. And I shook everybody's hand on the last song. And I walked down one side and I came back the other. I don't normally do that. And I did it that night because it was just the spirit was so great. And then to see what, what happened right after that, it just, um, it spun me.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Is it something you still think about a lot?

• 7:03Speaker 04

  All the time, all the time. We went through a period for a while where I had a fair amount of PTSD. I went through a couple of years of that. It's always there, always in the back of your mind. And I still think about it.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  She and Sonny had tickets to see you at the Grand Ole Opry. You didn't want to play that show. You, you did, you went on stage and you talked about this. And if it's okay, is it right if I play what you said?

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure.

• 7:25Speaker 05

  I went down the right side and I shook everybody's hand. And I told them, I told them, "Thank you for coming." It's been a heck of a year, it's been a hell of a year, actually. And I, uh, I went all the way down the right side, waved at my sound guy. Came back up the left side, smiling faces, hands in the air, pictures being taken. And I jumped back up on stage and I played "Old Mole" and "A Man That Was Gonna Die Young." And forty-eight hours later, those places that I stood was carnage.

• 8:07Speaker 05

  And those were my people. Those were my fans. And, um... I didn't want to be here tonight. And I didn't want to play guitar. And I didn't want to walk on this stage. But last night, let me try to get this out. Last night, somebody sent me a video of a lady named Heather Melton. And she was talking to Anderson Cooper on CNN. And she had on our church choir tour shirt. And he said, "What brought you to Vegas?" And she goes, "We went there to see Eric Church."

• 8:52Speaker 05

  And, and, because he was Sonny's, her husband who died, it was his guy. And we went there to see his guy. And... And then she said, "We have tickets for the Grand Ole Opry tomorrow night." And there's a, uh, over here, section three, row F, there's, if you're there, if you're in row F, there's some empty seats, and that's their seats. And I'm gonna tell you something. The reason I'm here, the reason I'm here tonight, is because of Heather Melton, her husband Sonny, who died.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  And every person that was there, because I'm gonna tell you something, I saw that crowd. I saw them with their hands in the air. I saw them. I saw them with boots in the air. And what I saw, that moment in time that was frozen, there's no amount of bullets that can take away. None.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  It's beautiful.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  I don't remember it.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  You what?

• 10:12Speaker 04

  I think I blacked out.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  You don't remember that?

• 10:14Speaker 04

  I mean, I remember having the emotion. I remember when I walked offstage that night after it was over with. Yes, I sometimes things. I don't. I remember it, but I don't. It's almost like I was watching that a little bit in a way, you know, but um. I'm just so overcome with emotion. I remember, I usually, I played a lot of stages, but I remember I was side stage that night, my wife was with me and I was just, I didn't know what I was gonna say. I didn't know if I could say anything. I didn't know if I could play the song that I had written in the, in the 48 hours since it happened. And I remember just pacing back and forth on the side of the Opry, you know, trying to figure out how, what I was gonna say. And it just came out.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Does that image that you talked about? Is that still frozen in your mind?

• 11:01Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Of that crowd, that joy?

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Not that there's a good in anything like this, but I will say that I have appreciated since that moment, when we get to the end of a show and I, I look at people. It really is a moment in time and you can take it for granted. And every show since then, I have had a moment in the show where I lock eyes or I, I appreciate that.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  We're taking for granted that we'll do this again. And I had taken that for granted up until that moment. And at least for me, I've been way more tuned into that on every show, every show I've played, every one, no matter where since then.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  The song you, you wrote, and you wrote it, I mean, 24 hours, 48 hours. Why Not Me, I just want to play a little bit of that. This is from the Grand Ole Opry.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Lord is my refuge, my fortress, my God with whom I trust.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  But I'll never know why the wicked gets to prey on the best of us.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  Why you full of life and parramas at the top of your lungs so loud?

• 12:21Speaker 04

  My songs that you sang so sweetly will ring in my ears forever now.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, when the morning sun hits the mountain and a glorious still calms the breeze, I'll ask the God of infinite wisdom, why you and why not me?

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Is it hard listening to that?

• 12:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Do you feel grief in your life? Is grief something you are cognizant of feeling?

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Um, yes, I, I think that I, I've always treated grief with, get as much space as you can between myself and the grief. Do whatever you can.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  Right, right. So that's, that's, I've always, because everybody talks about, you know, time heals, and that's true. But the grief process is what allows time to heal. I'm 48 now, so I find the last three or four years of my life. That's become all that stuff that you bury, which I do great at, kind of rub some dirt on it and keep rocking, comes back. So, yeah. And I had a period of time where a number of things happened to me that were traumatic or grief stuff. And at that time in my career, I just kept going. Another show, another whatever. Just keep rocking, keep going, keep working. And it's not what I would recommend to anybody.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Well, I found, I mean, I'm 58 and I just woke up to realizing I've never grieved. And that's why I'm doing this, because I'm trying to figure out what it means and learn how to do it, because I don't know.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  You literally went to war zones to get, I mean.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you talk about putting some dirt on it. I mean, I was putting layers and layers of dirt and thousands of miles between me and it. But you're right, it gets buried, but it doesn't go away.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Was that learned behavior? Or is that something?

• 14:16Speaker 02

  It's what I, as a little kid, figured out. I was so angry. I was so filled with rage. I used it as rocket fuel to propel myself forward. And I could outwork anybody.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  I could jump on a plane, abandon friendships, whatever. Work is the thing that I latched on to like a rocket. And it saved me until it doesn't.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  I was gonna say that there's a thing. I would say the same thing for me. You know, it's something that you just kind of, to me, it was always space. It's just get as much space as I can. Two weeks, one month, six weeks, you know, it's not healthy, but it's the way I've always dealt with it.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Do you find that different now?

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Because you've taken a break from recording, and I wondered how much of that is just like catching your breath?

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Some of it is family and kids, too. You just, you get older in life. I've got two boys. You just, you, you understand that we all, we all have trauma. Life is gonna have trauma. And I was never very well prepared, in my opinion, to deal with that at the times it happened. Because the times that it happened, at least specifically with Vegas, it was a traumatic event. This is not a sick parent or something that I see coming. It's something I could prepare for. It was, it was that. And I didn't, I did a horrible job at that and other things, but just figuring out how to deal with it. And I, my, my way to deal with it was just continue to keep your

• 15:41Speaker 04

  head down and play the next show, get on the bus. I mean, I lost my brother right after this.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you're, you had life threatening surgery, you had a blood clot that they discovered and boom, you had to go to surgery.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Then a couple of months later, there was the shooting in Vegas and then your brother Brandon died June 2018.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  All within a year. So I had three different things that confronted my own mortality. Right. And then I had two kind of very traumatic events. So I went through a number of things within a year that I had not went through really in my life. And I just, I mean, I played a show after my brother died. We buried him and I played a show four days later because I had a show and I knew he'd want me to play the show. He would want me to do this, you know, that kind of thing. They would want me to keep going, keep plugging. It's all these things you go in your head and, and that's right. It's not wrong that they would, but I didn't spend any time dealing with it. So I just kept playing, kept going. But I look back on it now, I've, you know, it's just, I'm not sure that was the right thing to do.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  It's so interesting. There's this loneliness epidemic, especially among guys in this country, and there's a suicide problem. And I think buried grief is at the heart of so much of the loneliness that especially guys feel because we're not able to talk about this crazy bond that we all have, which is I miss this person. And I found now in doing this, it's incredible to me how many people pass me notes on airplanes, like happened just on a flight the other day, two people passed me notes, like my sister killed herself a couple of years ago. And it's a beautiful connection. And I think it's awesome that you're even talking about this because I think there's probably a lot of people in

• 17:24Speaker 02

  your crowds who have that same feeling that you have and, and bury it just like you did and I did and so many of us did.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  Are you one of two, one of two kids?

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm, I'm it. I'm the last one from my little family. That's for me been the hardest part. Being like the only one left who remembers all these memories is a weird feeling.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  When my brother died, I didn't comprehend that it's never going to be the same again with my parents, with their relationship, with our, the whole family, the family dynamic. When, when my brother died.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  I wasn't prepared for that part. I had actually a call, and I think it's okay that I say this to you, but I had a call right after from Vince Gill. And Vince Gill lost iconic country artist, lost his brother. And of all people, like, two or three days after my brother died, Vince called me. And I didn't really know Vince very well. I'd met him. And he actually was the first one that said to me, he said, "You don't understand this now. But you're never gonna be the same. Your mom and dad are never gonna be the same. Your sister's never gonna be the same. Y'all are never gonna be the same as a unit. Nothing's

• 18:37Speaker 04

  ever gonna be the same. And the quicker you understand that, the better you'll deal with it." And at the time, I didn't get it. I was sitting there thinking, "Well, it's grief. We've always been the family." But looking back on it, that's, he's exactly right. It never is the same. When something like that happens, it changes everything, and it becomes a new normal. But at least with my brother, as people would try to talk about it, I have a ton of stories I could tell, and a ton of things, but I would, I wouldn't. I would just, I don't know, the pain, maybe?

• 19:12Speaker 02

  You have two boys, teenagers. I have two boys, just turned four, gonna turn six soon. I want to change. I want to get better, because I don't want them to use the same techniques that I use. And I want them to understand loss, and be able to talk about sadness and their feelings. And I already see it in my almost six-year-old, not talking about things. And so, it's one of the reasons I'm trying to, like, get better as fast as I can, because I want them to be able to, even to allow them to see me sad, and to see me

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  struggling with these things.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Have them in on the conversation.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  We made a mistake. I'll look back on it now. I know it was a mistake at the time, but we made a mistake. My brother died. It was such a traumatic thing. And we decided, my son, let's see, at the time, would have been six. Six, seven, and my other son would have been four or five. And we decided not to take him to the funeral. We left him back with a relative and we went to the funeral. And I look back at that now. At the time, it sounded like the exact right thing to do. Cause I was a wreck. I was a mess. My family was a mess. And I look back at it now. And sometimes it's good for a child, if they're in that age, five, six, seven, eight,

• 20:32Speaker 04

  to see everybody hurting, to see a life changing, to see what that death is. That it's a part of something. So that's one thing that I regret. If I could go back, I would go back. I would do that different.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  To see you in pain, but also to see you continue on, I think, is, you know, that it's not so cataclysmic that there is an after. And I talk about my dad and my mom and my kids asking me about their death. And like, we talk about it in ways I never did as a kid. I try to do it age appropriate and I see their curiosity about it. And to normalize it is kind of lovely. But I'm gonna go to the cemetery to see my mom, brother and dad. And my little six-year-old wants to come. And it's not, it's not weird to him. And it's interesting, cause I look back in history and grief used to be this communal experience. Your folks are from North Carolina. Your ancestry is from there. Mine's from, my dad's from Mississippi.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  During the depression, as a little kid, he went to funerals like every weekend. His mom played the piano.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  Dad wakes.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  At wakes.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  They would spend days, you know?

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And everybody would come, even if you didn't really know the person. It was just a communal activity.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  I think some of it is, as we've, with, times have changed a little bit where that was such, that permeated so much of the culture where I think now you're trying to protect your kids. And we're probably not. That's the one thing I've thought about more than anything. And listen, I have gave myself a little grace on that. My wife and I have talked about it, but I just was not in any frame of mind to make that decision, to be honest.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  But it's one of the things about country music, though, that I love, which is the things you talk about and sing about. It can be an upbeat song, but it's, it is like sadness and-

• 22:14Speaker 04

  It's real life.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  It's real life.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  But that's what makes it do great, right?

• 22:17Speaker 02

  You wrote two songs with your brother, "Without You Here."

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  And they're both, they're like upbeat, but also, you know, "Without You Here." And actually, if we could, could we just play the one song?

• 22:33Speaker 04

  That kid.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  I know who's that.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Who's that guy? Long time ago, man.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  I could pull up you on some Channel One stuff. You wouldn't pull it up. I used to watch you in my high school.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Oh, were you a Channel One kid?

• 22:50Speaker 04

  I was a Channel One kid. Our high school was Channel One. You used to do crazy stuff.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's true.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  I ain't seen this video in 10 years.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  It moves. I like it.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. We didn't have a good budget, so we shot our own video and just passed the camera around.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it looks great.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  That's the way it did it back then.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  That's one of the songs you covered with your brother.

• 23:14Speaker 04

  It was. My brother was, um, I wouldn't be where I am today. When I came to Nashville, like any experience for a young artist and Nashville songwriter, it's tough. You think you're really good, I would say this to any artist out there, you think you're really good, till you get to Nashville and you see what really good looks like. And I went through a couple of years of trying to make it and it wasn't working. And I was about to come home one night and I was in a band with my brother, really close to my brother, before I went to Nashville. And I called him and he was doing, he was back home, he dropped out of school. And he said, what's going on? I said, man, I'm just not for, I'm not on work, you know? I said, I feel like life's passing me by. I feel like all my friends and everybody back there is moving on with their life.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  They're getting married, they're doing this stuff. I'm out here treading water, right? And the next day he showed up in Nashville. We drove and I had a one-bedroom apartment. He slept on my fold-out couch for a year, just to keep me there. And he just moved in and we found our own rhythm and our own life, but he wouldn't let me go. He said, no, you're not, don't come here, I'll come to you. And he moved out and it kept me in town. And a year later, things started to kind of happen, but I don't tell a lot of people that, but that wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him doing that, because that was an ultimate commitment. He dropped everything where he was and said, pack a bag, I'll sleep on your couch. And that's what he did.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Do you still feel him?

• 24:42Speaker 04

  I do.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  I don't feel my brother, and I think it's because of the nature of how he died and how his colors, how he lived. But you do feel.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  I do. It's interesting when it is, when it happens. I went through a period where, you know, we all go through, my brother had, like, for your brother too, had... Troubles and a regret I have is when he was going through some of those troubles. I did a little bit of the, this is, this is what you, you're not doing the things you're supposed to be doing. And it was a little bit of the tough love big brother thing. And I wish I'd had more grace and been more compassionate now, now, looking back at it. But at that time, you think, oh, come on, get your shit together, kind of thing. And I regret that now, but I do still feel my brother.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  I feel a lot with music. There's not a night that goes by, there's a song called Sinners Like Me, that was on my first album. And it's a line in it about a headstone and going to see my grandfather. And now I throw my brother and my grandfather in that when I do that line. So at least there I feel him when I'm on stage.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Did you know your grandfather?

• 25:52Speaker 04

  I did.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Wow, that's cool.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I did.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  And you feel him?

• 25:56Speaker 04

  I do. He was integral in my life, just a paternal figure. When I was growing up, taught me how to fish, taught me, he was the chief of police in our hometown there, just a bigger than life guy.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  My uncle was a sheriff in a small town in Mississippi.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  There you go. We're at Mississippi.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  My dad's from a tiny town called Quitman, near Meridian.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  I know Meridian, I've been through Meridian.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Have you really?

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. I played everywhere, Anderson. Like you, I've been everywhere twice.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  I don't think there's a venue big enough for Meridian for you.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  I think I probably played, who knows what I did, but I played there.

• 26:23Anderson Cooper?

  We're gonna take a short break. More of my conversation with Eric Church in just a moment.

• 27:01Speaker 06

  I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. We're going to talk about rethinking how we die. How we think about death in the first place greatly informs how we live. Our guest is Dr. B.J. Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care physician.

• 27:19Speaker 07

  We are aging as a people. This is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group. It's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interests, services, and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from the subject and makes us cling to life.

• 27:39Speaker 06

  Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Welcome back to my conversation with Eric Church. There's another kind of connection that we have, which you don't know about, which is the Covenant School shooting, which happened in 2023. I recently was down in Nashville and I interviewed Chad and Jada Scruggs, whose daughter Hallie was one of the kids killed in that school shooting. And I know your kids go to a school not far from there.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  A mile and a half.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  A mile and a half. And I know that was a huge.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  Massive, yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  What about that?

• 28:20Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, there's a couple of things you expect in life. You expect to drop your kids off at school and be able to pick them up from school. Like, that's kind of a given in this country. That's at least for me, the way I grew up. And I think the hardest thing I've ever done is the day after the Covenant shooting, the people in Nashville decided that it was best for the kids to resume life and go back to school, taking them to school that morning.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  And I'd taken them to school a thousand times and watching them walk in that school. I've never felt more helpless. I've never had more anxiety and fear about that and what that was. And I remember I didn't know what to do. And I pulled over in the parking lot. I kind of felt like I needed to be there. You feel like you, I'm not leaving. I'm gonna sit here all day if I have to, you know? Kind of your garden, the sheep, right? And I pulled in the parking lot. I was lost in my own thoughts and really just going through all this. And I looked to my left and I looked to my right and there were parents down this entire line doing the same thing. They were doing the same thing I was doing.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Just sitting in the parking lot?

• 29:30Speaker 04

  Just sitting there because nobody knew what to do. Nobody knew how to encounter the loss and the tragedy of what that was and thinking about sending your kid to school and then being killed by a shooter at school. And it was incredibly helpless. That's the best word I have. It was helpless. And to this day, that's the hardest thing I've ever done. I've never had something like that emotionally.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Chad is actually the pastor at the school and I just want to play you, I just want you to meet them a little bit. I want you to, I just want to play a little bit what I talked to, talked to them about. What has grief been like for you?

• 30:09Speaker 08

  Felt like everything collapsed, everything internally. The pain that, I mean, gosh, it's just hard to endure. And then, you know, you have to relearn how to do everything, like how to eat, how to sleep. And you just have a new relationship with pain and sadness and anger. There's been joy too, but the sadness was, has been, was just, I mean, overwhelming. I went into her room to lay on her bed this morning. I knew that would go and I wanted...

• 30:50Speaker 02

  You knew that, you knew the smell would dissipate?

• 30:52Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And her blankie was there and everything was there.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  And you could smell her that night?

• 30:57Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. That was true probably for a week or two after. So you're trying to get her back. It's not possible, but you don't believe that. And so anything that... That draws that possibility closer. I wanted to be there for that. So yeah, I went in and just laid on her bed and cried by myself.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Really amazing people.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Has it gotten easier for you? Your brother's death, does carrying it get easier?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Or do you feel like you haven't, still haven't really?

• 31:35Speaker 04

  I think the more you bury stuff like that, which I'm prone to do, which we've talked about, the more it comes back in the most unexpected places, right? Where you won't expect grief, my brother or whatever. Even the covenant thing was a pretty traumatic, just because I related that to Vegas. So for me, it was this perfect world, this bubble, right? And taking my kids to school in Nashville, Tennessee to a private school is a bubble. So it's seeing how it's not a bubble. And I think the vulnerability of that, it's interesting where the more I've pushed that down, even though my brother died in 2018, so it's been eight years, and those

• 32:18Speaker 04

  things will come out of nowhere. And I think that's probably just not dealing with it the right way. Or maybe that's, maybe that's what we all deal with, right? I don't know.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  How do you see it coming, like bubbling? Where do you see it?

• 32:30Speaker 04

  Oh, just out of nowhere, just simple, with emotion or with whatever, just when you don't even, you don't even see, I guess, I don't even know how to describe it. I just don't see it coming. That train's not coming. And then there it is, right? And actually, it's probably manifested more, the last two or three years, I've had a lot of moments like that. And you would think after five, six, seven years, that wouldn't happen. They would be less frequent. But I've found that they've been more frequent the last few years. So I don't know how to, I don't know. I mean, a counselor would tell you, I probably should do some of that. But it's been unexpected where some of that stuff's come from.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  When I heard you have this bar where you play, people put away their phones, and you sing songs which are more personal than maybe you put on an album.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Most of that stuff I've never put on an album. That was one of the first times it manifested. So this is a couple of years ago. And I would talk, because I didn't talk about my brother. I didn't talk about my brother with my family. It was like this thing.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  But after his death, he didn't.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Impact, I mean, not.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  It's not what you did.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Not talk about it.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  It would come up, but we didn't talk about it. And my family's not great at that, anyway.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Did you do your mom or dad?

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Not really. I mean, my mom's gotten better at it. My dad's gotten better at it. He struggled with that for a while, pretty bad. But I've gotten better. What happened to me when I did the, um, as long as it's like therapy at Chiefs.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Chiefs is the bar?

• 33:59Speaker 04

  The bar, right. I would sit there and I would, I would play songs. I wrote a song about my brother called Church Boys. And never been on, never been recorded, never will be. It was for me and those people in that room that came. And I would talk about that. And I would talk about Almost Dying. And I talked about Vegas. And I went through some things just in front of 500 strangers.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  But I'm the only one up there. They're not talking. I'm the only one talking. And I found myself just more and more just talking about it. And it actually helped a little bit. I've gotten better with talking about my brother more, telling stories about my brother more. I mean, that was six years after he died before I could start doing that. I think some things like that, they either bubble or they burst. And somewhere in between is probably where I was.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  I totally get that, though. For me, it's very hard to talk about my brother. Even now, like, my voice starts to get funky on me, which I can't even control, which is weird.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  How long has that been?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  I mean, I was 21 years old. He was 23, so I'm 58, so I don't know. I flunked math, but a long time.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  Long time.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  And, and I can't tell how much of it is just like the, the violence of his death and the fact that it was a suicide. And you talk about, there were some things, maybe you wish you'd done differently with your brother. When I realized my brother was going through some things, which was very quickly before he died, it all happened very fast, a matter of a month or a couple of months. I could not deal with it. Like, the idea that there was something going on with him. That did not fit into my plan of like me surviving and me propelling myself forward.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  And you were also young.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  I was a kid, yeah. And I couldn't figure out how to, you know, we had both been raised in the same way, or we both developed in the same way, and we both couldn't talk to each other.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  How'd your mom deal with it?

• 35:51Speaker 02

  He killed himself in front of her. He jumped off the balcony. You know, my mom had been through a lot as a little kid, and she had this inner core that she would say that was like this rock hard diamond that she felt that she developed as a little kid to get through her childhood, that nothing could ever break. She had that idea in her mind. And so she mourned and grieved and cried and wailed and for a long time. And she was never the same, but I knew she could survive. I knew she would survive. It never went away. It's impossible for something like that to go away.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  It's impossible. You have kids now. It's impossible.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  It's unimaginable to me.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, unimaginable.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Is there anything else about loss or about grief that you think about?

• 36:33Speaker 04

  Yes, I'm a religious person. I have a lot of faith. And that, as far as grief goes, with my beliefs and what I believe, that has sustained me and steeled me at times that I'm not 100% sure with what I do for a living and how I do it, that I wouldn't have spun myself out of control. And that has been at least an anchor for me that has kept me, I'm not saying between the lines, but I'm gonna say between the buoys. And it's kept me somewhat more to knowing and trusting my faith and my spirituality.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Is it the idea that you will see your brother again?

• 37:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's one. That's one thing, but it's also the idea that you trust that a higher power is in charge. And nobody wants to go through this, but you understand, at least for me, that this was... How it was supposed to happen and it's unfortunate and you use faith to deal with the, the, the next steps of that.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  It's a great thing to have.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  I can just speak from my own experience and that's one thing I've learned about grief. Everybody always tell you however you react is the way you're supposed to react. And I always thought that was funny when I first heard it, right? But I think that's right because there were times that I didn't know how to respond on things. Sometimes you almost, it's like you laugh, like, and you don't know you shouldn't be laughing, right? It's stupid, like you, but you, almost your body, it's the emotion of it, however you react is the way you're supposed to react. And I think that that's just grief, grief is just a, it's, it is a, it is just a different kind of thing, you know?

• 38:07Speaker 02

  It's nuts.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  It's nuts.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  I know a lot smarter people have said it more eloquently, but it's the weirdest thing. It's crazy to me that you can go your entire life running from it, just ignore it, trying to ignore it and stuff, but, and it's just there waiting.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  I worry in society now, we try to be so buttoned up and we try to pretend we're this and we're, as you go back to the, in the south where we had wakes and I mean funerals were as big as weddings. It was like three days and even back in where you, Mississippi, you were, they, they would sit up with the body.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  It was a wake, you know, in your home, you know?

• 38:44Speaker 02

  There was no hiding it. The kids were around the coffin.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  The kids are playing around the coffin.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  There was a guy in my dad's town named Mr. Raspberry who would show up apparently and would always like.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  His name was Mr. Raspberry?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Mr. Raspberry and he would wail and cry and my dad as a kid turned to his aunt and was like, why does Mr. Raspberry cry so much? And she was like, well, if you ask me, his, his bladder is just too close to his eyeballs. Which I think is great.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  It is great. But I guess if you look at historically, we treated death different and grieving different than I think we treat it in this world where everything's supposed to be buttoned up. You're worried, oh, we don't want to expose them to that, we don't want to do this, we want to, we won't want to appear that we're whatever. And I think that's not the way to deal with it. I went through a thing, um, probably a couple of years ago where with my brother, I used to dread. The day he died, every year on the calendar, it became this thing.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  What's the date?

• 39:38Speaker 04

  June 29th. I would dread it. And also, I would dread his birthday, which is August 17th. So those, those two days were the thing. I didn't just want to, they had two days to the calendar that I didn't want to deal with. But I, I, I think over the last few years, three years maybe, I've started to where I could celebrate that day. Um, he's got a daughter and she, she's gotten older and I could celebrate that day versus dread that day. And I think that's progress.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  It's huge.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  It's progress. It's not the thing that I want to go from the end of June to July 4th weekend really quickly.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Everybody has those dates on the calendar. My dad's death day was January 5th. My brother's birthday is January 27th, so.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. The dreaded holidays. My mom started calling them.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  That, I mean, that's key. I've, I've had it, and you're going to get to this too, probably, but um, this past year, we, uh, we go to the mountains of North Carolina for Christmas and I'm, I usually take the, my two boys and we'll go shop for my wife and we'll go ride around and we have a day. And this past year, for the first time, as we were driving back to the house and my son surprised me with it. And he goes, hey, I want to know more. Tell me about Uncle, they called him Uncle B. And he said, tell me more about Uncle B. And it floored me.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  And um, I realized I probably hadn't talked about it a lot, but you know what? For the next 30 minutes as I was driving, I told him stories that I probably shouldn't have told him. I don't think their mom would have been happy with it. Now, we talked about it and, and it's different too, when your kids get older and they're going to want to know some of these things, you know, and you can talk about some of those.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  I've had that, that happened too. My son will ask a question about my brother and even thinking about it, like, sort of, my eyes will burn a little bit and my voice will quiver like it is right now. But then I try, I start telling us, him a story and I'm able to do it in a way that doesn't infuse it with anything other than this is the story and it's a funny story or whatever. And it's nice to be able to.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  To have that moment where you can tell the story that's free of the pain of it and just and for him, it's just, there is no pain associated with it. It's just a story about this person he doesn't know and it's kind of, it's lovely.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  I think a lot of times, we'll go back to the death thing. I had another person tell me, very wise, he'd lost a lot of people. And he said, that, that death happened that one time, but the life happened all the time up until that. And I think sometimes we get caught up in what happened, how it happened, when it happened, but we forget about all the stuff that happened up until that moment. So that's been something that I've learned, I guess.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for doing this.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

• 42:22Anderson Cooper?

  Eric's latest album, Evangelion vs. The Machine, is available now and you can see him live on his Free the Machine tour this year. Next week, on Thursday, February 26, join me at 9:15 PM Eastern for my live streaming show, All There Is Live. Just go to cnn.com/allthereis and you can watch it there. If you miss the live stream, it'll be posted the following day for a week on the site. If there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others, feel free to leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. You can also send us a video message and email it to us at [email protected] or send it to us on Instagram, @allthereis. Thanks so much for listening. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone.

• 43:08Speaker 09

  Get ready for election night. CNN is available to stream live now with an All Access subscription. Plus, get exclusive content and interactive Q and As with CNN's journalists. Subscribe now. Visit cnn.com/allaccess. The stakes couldn't be higher. Join CNN's trusted journalists for Election Night in America. Coverage starts November 3 at 5 on CNN or streaming live with an All Access subscription. Subscribe at cnn.com/allaccess.