Eric Church performs during America Salutes You Presents: A Tribute To Billy Gibbons, A Live Benefit Concert, at The Grand Ole Opry on May 16, 2021, in Nashville. Jason Kempin/Getty Images
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Most people visit a restaurant for a meal, and the wilderness to decompress. For Eric Church, they were the sites of a creative endeavor.
In January 2020, Church settled in with his band at the Artisinal restaurant on the North Carolina side of the Smoky Mountains for a month of music-making. The goal was simple: Write and record a new song each day until he built up enough material for three albums: Heart, & and Soul. The lattermost collection wound up including “Hell of a View,” which topped Billboard’s Country Airplay chart dated May 29, 2021.
The song became an exercise after Church and his cowriters got their steps in one morning. Casey Beathard returned from his walk with an idea about a couple living and loving on the edge, and he developed the initial lines with Monty Criswell. Church joined in once he got back from a run.
After they finished writing it, they recorded the song that day with drummer Craig Wright mic-ed up in the wine cellar. Producer Jay Joyce (Miranda Lambert, Brothers Osborne) finished it overnight after Church and the rest of the musicians went to bed.
Released to country radio on Oct. 20, 2020, “Hell of a View” scaled Country Airplay in its 29th week on the list, becoming the 10th of Church’s 11 career No. 1s. It also hit No. 2 on the multimetric Hot Country Songs chart. He led the list most recently as featured on Morgan Wallen’s “Man Made a Bar” for a week in April 2024.
