Some things you just can’t control. Eric Church has been thrown plenty of curveballs in his career. Obviously one of the most well-known of those came when he was kicked off the Me & My Gang tour with Rascal Flatts for playing too long and too loud, a decision that he’s acknowledged left him on the outside looking in when it was time to find another tour. But while that one may have been of his own making, sometimes curveballs come along that you just can’t predict. Earlier this year, Eric and Jelly Roll sat down for a conversation during the final day of CRS, the annual Country Radio Seminar in Nashville for industry members to give their insights and new artists to showcase their talent. And one thing Jelly wanted to know about was where Eric got the idea for his surprise album, Mr. Misunderstood. If you remember back to 2015, fans were surprised when a copy of the brand new Eric Church album showed up in their mailbox unannounced. And while Eric admits that the label wasn’t too happy with him, he said that he had come up with a plan to get the music out to the fans first while making a splash when he finally unveiled the new album to the public. A big part of that plan was to perform the album’s title track, “Mr. Misunderstood,” at the CMA Awards, his first public acknowledgement of the new project, and then immediately release it to the public after his performance. According to Eric, he was convinced that his plan would generate headlines and bring plenty of attention to the new album in a unique way. “We’re gonna debut a song on the CMA Awards called ‘Mr. Misunderstood,’ and the minute that song is over, it’s gonna go live. We’ve already got the records in the stores… Sometimes in my life…you have things that are timestamps in your life… But we walked out on the CMA Awards, and we played Mr. Misunderstood, and I feel great about it. I end it and I’m like, ‘This is going to be the greatest campaign of all time. This is going to f–k up music for a decade.'” As it turns out though, there was a little bit of a curveball in the form of the very next performance after he debuted his brand new song. That performance came from Justin Timberlake and a then-relatively unknown (outside of Nashville) artist named Chris Stapleton. The two hit the stage for a duet of Timberlake’s “Drink You Away” and Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey” and absolutely brought the house down. It’s a performance that people still talk about to this day, and one that made Chris Stapleton a household name. And it completely overshadowed Church’s big album announcement: “I got one minute into that and went, ‘We’re f–ked.’ I just knew. Your whole moment is like, ‘Ok this is it.’ And then I went, ‘Oh, no it’s not.’ It ended up being ok.” Yeah, turns out that wasn’t a great year to try to get headlines at the CMA Awards. Of course as Church says, everything turned out fine. Mr. Misunderstood, which was released 10 years ago today on November 4, 2015, debuted at #3 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 200 album chart, and has since been certified 3x platinum. It also produced a #1 hit for Church with “Record Year,” and songs like “Mistress Named Music” and “Knives of New Orleans” that are still fan favorites and staples of his live shows. But unfortunately for Church, even though he had carefully planned the rollout of the album, there were just some things that were out of his control – like one of the biggest moments in country music of the past decade. The post Eric Church Thought He Was Screwed After His Surprise “Mr. Misunderstood” Album Announcement Was Upstaged By Chris Stapleton At The CMA Awards first appeared on Whiskey Riff.