At Stagecoach, Eric Church Brings a Full Choir, Saves His Band for the Finale and Has Polarized Fans Debating a Love-It-or-Leave-It Set

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic It would be hard to imagine a more actually polarizing set — as in, splitting real fans into roughly even, truly diametrically opposed camps — than the headlining show Eric Church delivered to round out the first night of Stagecoach in California.

The 70,000 festival attendees will definitely not lack for anything to talk, or argue, about for the rest of the weekend, and the debate will also continue among the many more fans who watched the livestream on Prime Video and Amazon’s Twitch channel.

Rather than rock out, as many expected after Jelly Roll’s preceding performance, Church — after about a 20-minute delay in starting the show — adopted a truly churchy aesthetic, seated on a stool in front of a giant stained-glass video wall and joined by a 16-member choir, fronted by the return of his longtime vocal accompanist, Joanna Cotton.

This ethos was felt in covers of vaguely or overtly spiritual songs like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Edwin Hawkins’ “Oh Happy Day” and “This Little Light of Mine,” but Church mixed these up with distinctly secular and contemporary picks — throwing in snippets of Tupac and Snoop Dogg classics, a la “Gin and Juice,” to draw some kind of throughline between the sacred and the profane.