Eric Church's three-part album, Heart & Soul is almost here in its entirety. Having released the first part, Heart, last week, parts 2 and 3, & and Soul respectfully, are dropping this week. The country star is celebrating his new music on April 22nd during the exclusive iHeartCountry Album Release Party with Eric Church, and in a preview of the event, he explains how Elton John's biopic, Rocketman, helped inspire one of his new songs.

In the clip, Church explains that he was watching Rocketman with his wife one night, and one of the scenes in the movie gave him the idea for his song "Rock & Roll Found Me" from Soul. He recalled:

"This whole project, I got to a place, creatively, that I had never been to before. I would define it as, not stable, but somebody like my wife who was a former publisher that worked with songwriters, she loved it because you get to see what's coming in, but it was almost like a manic ... So if you get up in the morning and write a song, and then you record that song that night, then that day's done, you got to do it again. And after four or five or six days, that becomes this treadmill of, you know, everything was a song to me. And I'll give you an example. We're probably not gonna play this song, but I think its on Soul, and it's a song called 'Rock & Roll Found Me.' I took a weekend off and my family came to hang out with me in the mountains, and my wife said, let's just have a movie night, pop popcorn, we've got a bottle of wine. We sat down and we watched Elton John's movie, Rocketman. And, I'm 20 minutes into this thing and he's dressed in this costume and he's at an AA meeting or something. And he goes, 'I was however many years old when rock and roll found me.' And when he said that, I got up, said pause the movie, I went to the kitchen, I wrote the song. And I just was so into that world and that creativity, I couldn't turn it off. And, good or bad, depends on who you talking to, but that's the way it all turned out."

Heart & Soul follow's Church's 2018 album Desperate Man, and consists of three parts: Heart (released on 4/16), & (released on 4/20), and Soul (released on 4/23). Church previously said of his new music, "We wrote and recorded 28 songs in 28 days. We secluded ourselves in the mountains of North Carolina, and I would get up in the morning and write a song, and we would record the song that night. And the thinking was, we would remove all the barriers of what people think, or a publisher thinks, or a label thinks. It was really letting creativity be creativity. And, some of my favorite records from the 70s and 80s were done that way. So we tried to go back and let creativity reign, and it is unequivocally my favorite music we've done."

Fans can listen and tune in free for a stream of the exclusive iHeartRadio Album Release Party with Eric Church on Thursday, April 22nd at 7pm local time via LiveXLive.com or the LiveXLive app. Fans can also listen to the show via iHeartRadio's iHeartCountry Radio channel.

Tay Hamilton

About Tay Hamilton