Eric Church’s CMA Performance Will ‘Shed Light’
Eric Church is not a nominee at tonight‘s (11/20) 58th Annual CMA Awards in Nashville. However, the country superstar will be performing on the show. Eric even did interviews talking about his performance, which is sure to be a memorable moment.
Church told us, “I’m performing ‘Darkest Hour,’ and the biggest thing for me with this performance is continuing to shed light on Hurricane Helene and what happened to my home in Western North Carolina. The devastation is immense, and the biggest part for me is that I feel like in this country, with our news cycle, we move very quickly to the next thing, and those people are gonna need help for a long time.”
He added, “And the more I can shine a light on that and the more I can raise awareness for it the more we can do. So that’s my reason for doing ‘Darkest Hour.'”
Hurricane Helene was a devastating tropical cyclone that caused widespread destruction and numerous fatalities across the Southeastern United States in late September 2024.
It was the strongest hurricane on record to strike the Big Bend region of Florida, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Maria in 2017, and the deadliest to strike the mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005.
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The song is Church’s first new solo release in over three years.
Eric said of the song when he first released it, “From Western North Carolina, East Tennessee, Upstate South Carolina, parts of Georgia, and even Florida, which took a direct hit, there are so many places that were impacted. Specifically, in the area that I’m from, the mountains of Western North Carolina were devastated. There are places that are just biblically gone. These are our family members, they’re our friends, they’re our neighbors – and they’re in dire need of help.”
He offers, “And I’ve been in the studio for a while, trying some different things and exploring creativity. I had this song that I’d written, and the line that struck me in light of the recent devastation was ‘I’ll come running,’ because there are a lot of people out there right now who are in their darkest hour and they need people to come running. We were going to wait to release music until next year, but it just didn’t feel right to wait with this song. Sometimes you give songs their moment and sometimes they find their own moment.”
Church explains, “This song, ‘Darkest Hour,’ was the best way I could think to try to help. We’ve been helping with boots on the ground efforts, but this is something that will live beyond just the immediate recovery. This is not a quick thing to fix, so hopefully, ‘Darkest Hour’ will be able to contribute to that for a long time to come. This song goes to my home, North Carolina, now and forever.”
