Eric Church never intended to pen a resilient rallying cry for starved music fans hungrily awaiting for concert halls to welcome them once again.

Self-isolated from tour dates, bandmates and studio time, Church sat down during his Easter holiday and wrote a reminder to himself that he’ll see music’s communal joy first-hand soon.

With three-hour fellowships inside sold-out arenas for thousands united by rock ‘n’ roll and pledging allegiance to country music, he’s seen that joy time and again.

Starting what would be a defiant monologue, Church said he thought of a moment in his show — typically during “Springsteen” or “Holdin’ My Own,” two unifying anthems from Nashville’s 21st century answer to Bob Seger — where he reminds fans that music can freeze a moment in time.

Church thought “in my head and my heart” about shows from the last few years — three-hour marathon gigs where fans would toss boots in the air and smuggle vinyl albums into the venue for hopes of an autograph or quick hug from the night’s entertainer.

Church wanted the message to "give a little hope," he told The Tennessean.

“I always try to take a mental picture,” Church said. “I tell the crowd about it. I tell them to look to their left, look to their right and think about how special we are that we get to do this. Not knowing where we were heading, that was on my mind … just incredibly special moments.”

And, turns out, as COVID-19 continues to gnarl virtually all industries, Church wasn’t alone in needing to hear a little hope.

He posted the note last weekend to social media in a spoken-word call insisting that “Where fear preys, we will feed” and that “I feel for our enemy, for it has no chance, has no prayer. And I believe, I believe our best is yet to come.”

“Where there once were roars, now there are just echoes,” Church said in the video. “The handshakes and the hugs of yours are now too dangerous. But I don’t believe in fear. I don’t believe in panic. I don’t believe in all its complexity this damn virus has any idea what it's up against.”

It continued, “The American resolve, steel by the world, steady by faith, calm by song, healed by prayer. Oh, I believe. Damn right, I believe. I believe these halls will roar again. These stadiums will be deafening in the answer to this enemy. The silence of now will cower at the noise of sync. When the question of who will answer this call asks, thousands will raise their fist and say ‘I will, we will.’ Then we damn sure will.”

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Church teamed the speech with a teaser to a new tune, “Through My Ray Bans,” the latest in a trail of songs to surface from his marathon recording session earlier this year in the rural North Carolina mountains.

With a chorus singing “Everybody’s got their arms around everybody else’s shoulders/ Guarding against the world like an army of Friday night soldiers,” Church said the song tied perfectly into the message. He started the track months ago, finishing it one night during a dinner break at his latest studio run.

“What’s interesting is to look back, that was about a month before [COVID-19] started,” Church said. “It’s wild to see how music can do that. It can mean so many different things at different times of your life.”

He added, “I'm glad we took the time to finish the song and to be done with it. We'll see what happens with it now.”

Church’s Appalachian retreat — he recorded in Banner Elk, North Carolina, in a seasonal local restaurant shuttered for winter — yielded 28 songs in 28 days, the latest in a history of do-it-for-the-art decisions from a Nashville noisemaker who’s never strummed to the status quo.

He debuted one song, “Jenny,” acoustic at Country Radio Seminar in February and another, “Never Break Heart,” earlier this month during the Academy of Country Music’s “Our Country” network special.

Church followed a simple formula for the album: Wake up, write, record and repeat. Ambitious? Absolutely. It was “the most uncomfortable thing in the world,” he said, “but it needed to be that way.”

More:Eric Church wrote and recorded 28 songs in 28 days for his next project

The formula pushes creative life into a process that gets “choked” when someone writes a song in March and waits until December to cut it, Church explained.

“You can't just go into the studio and say, ‘Hey, we're going to make another album,’” he said. “You lose some of the desperation, some of the intensity, that you have early in your career. And the only way that I knew to do that from a creative standpoint — and I'm speaking purely creative — was to put myself in a position I hadn't been in.”

He continued, “What if we put a bunch of pressure on me as a writer and the players as players and we make this like they used to make rock ‘n’ roll records?”

And there’s no rush to unleash a flood of new music, Church said. A release timeline is “up in the air,” but, in a silver lining to self-isolation, he’s been spending more time getting to know this new collection of songs.

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Church said he’s not sure if it’ll be a double album or more (or less); he’s still deciding. But he’s confident enough that “there will be some new music before too long” and, as it stands, fans should hear all 28 tracks one day.

“It’s my favorite time,” Church said, “When you know whatever you have and nobody’s heard it but you. You’ve not given it to the world yet. … Very rarely do you get to spend this much time I've just been letting it wash over me and see what i think and what i feel and what’s moving me.”

And he’s sure of one thing: It’ll be an album. One that gets played loud and, hopefully, with thousands singing along.

“I believe it needs to be an album, it needs to be listened to as an album,” Church said. “That’s the way I listen so that’s what I’m gonna make whatever this next project turns out to be. It’s gonna be conceived that way and made that way.”