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At Stagecoach, Eric Church Brings a Full Choir, Saves His Band for the Finale and Has His Polarized Fans Debating a Love-It-or-Leave-It Set
Eric Church's seated, choir-backed headlining Stagecoach set was far from what audiences expected, which led to both hosannas and blowback from fans.
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. 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. (To be fair, although videos posted on social media showed scores of festivalgoers heading for the exit with their lawn chairs and blankets, any Stagecoach closing set is going to be marked by people making a beeline for cars and campers, so isolated clips aren’t always indicative of the mass mood.)
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