Eric Church isn’t afraid to raise a little hell and be an outsider — and with that attitude and his outlaw country vibes, he’s been able to build an incredibly successful country music career from the ground up. But there are three people that get him to show his tender side: his two sons, Boone and Hawk, and his wife, Katherine Blasingame.
Church’s wife, a music publisher, was in the music business before he was, and they met through work: ”She was trying to hook me up to write with one of her writers that she represented, that was how we met,” he tells Taste of Country.
“It’s great now, because being a publisher and being somebody in the industry, I can bounce songs off of her, and she has the knowledge, you know, to be kind of that sounding board of what I should cut and what I shouldn’t cut,” he adds. “So, she’s one of those in the inner circle that I run a lot of stuff by.”
Church and Blasingame were married on Jan. 8, 2008, at the Westglow Spa & Resort in Blowing Rock, N.C. The couple picked the serene location after staying there and falling in love with its beauty.
“We decided that it would be the ideal spot to get married, up in the North Carolina mountains, with just family around us,” Church reveals. “I can’t imagine a more perfect spot.”
At the wedding, Church showed off his softer side by performing a song he wrote for Blasingame, “You Make It Look So Easy,” which is one of the tracks on his Carolina record. But the best part? His wife didn’t know that he was writing a song for the wedding.
“Neither did I,” Church admits. “I hate love songs. I have a hard time with them. I think they’ve been done so many times, and I hate stuff that’s just your cliches. I thought, ‘There’s got to be another way to do this.’ I decided that the best way was to just be honest. There’s a ‘drink too much’ line in there. That’s honest.
“At the wedding is the first time Katherine really heard the whole thing. She cried. Everybody cried,” he adds. “That’s me baring my soul, there.”
The song tells Katherine just how easy it is to love her — and how great an impact she’s made on Church’s life: “You’re my refuge from the road / A safe place to go / When I’m out here livin’ on this ledge / And when I’m circlin’ the drain / You keep my crazy sane / And quiet all the voices in my head.”
“Like Jesus Does,” on Church’s Chief album, also has a connection to Katherine: It’s the only song of Church’s career so far that he cut but didn’t write, and, he reveals, “It’s because of her. She found the song and played it for me, and I loved it, too.”
Church and his wife are now parents to two beautiful boys, Boone McCoy and Tennesee Hawkins — the icing on top of their very sweet story of love.