Eric Church quite literally dreamed up one of the songs on his forthcoming new album. The country star says a song called "Crazy Land" came to him in a dream one night.

"I actually dreamed the chorus of the song, and I woke up ... and I wrote it down, and then I ended up writing the rest of the song to the chorus," Church tells country radio DJ Bobby Bones.

"I guess when you get to a creative point, you get in the groove like that ... I was crazy at the time, so, you know," he adds with a chuckle.

In January, Church and his crew recorded 28 songs over 28 days, at an old restaurant in the mountains of North Carolina that they turned into a studio for the occasion. The project kept the singer and his co-conspirators up late; in fact, Church admits, they had to take a couple days off during the sessions because he'd stayed up for four straight days, unable to unwind and sleep.

"I think the word's manic," he says of that stretch of time.

The goal of the marathon studio session, Church explains, was to harness a special bit of creative energy: "You always have that moment when a song is born, and then you have two months or three months before you get in the studio and you bring that thing to life," he muses, "and I just thought the feeling and the experience of that is something we underestimate."

"When the song is born, whatever those things are in the atmosphere that make it turn into something magical, I wanted to try to grab that," Church adds.

Previously, the megastar has teased that his four weeks of recording yielded enough material for a double album, at least. Recently, due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, he's been spending a lot of time alone, listening to the music. He and his team are "still working on" final plans, but, he says, fans will get to hear the entire session "in some form."

"[My new single, "Stick That in Your Country Song"] is a great first stick point to what is gonna be a lot of music and is gonna be a very long process," Church hints. "I don't wanna go very much into that, but it's the most special project of my career, and we're gonna treat it that way."

"Stick That in Your Country Song," written by Davis Naish and Jeffrey Steele, is only the second song Church has ever recorded that he did not write (the first was "Like Jesus Does"). The two tunesmiths co-wrote the track back in 2015, yet its call to focus on real-world issues through music remains just as relevant today.


10 Things You Didn't Know About Eric Church: