For the EMI Records Nashville promotion team, the title of Eric Church’s current tour is appropriate, since it took plenty of “blood, sweat and beers”—not to mention six years and 10 singles—to land the artist his first No. 1.

But when it came to making his most recent single, “Drink In My Hand,” a hit, EMI VP of promotion Angela Lange (pictured) says, radio “wanted it as bad as we did… It’s been just really so much fun sharing this ride with them.” (For more on how radio feels about Church and this single, see the sidebar “Radio Programmers Toast Eric Church’s ‘Drink In My Hand’”.)

For Lange, who has worked Church’s records since the beginning—first at sister label Capitol and then at EMI—she says, “It’s been an interesting ride” as the label teams worked diligently to overcome radio’s concerns that Church’s music was a little too left of center.

Initially, Lange says, some programmers “thought [his music] was a little edgy and didn’t know how it would fit into the format.” Since then, however, “he’s really made his own little spot for himself.”

Even as radio was already starting to come around, Church grabbed the industry’s attention in a dramatic way last summer when his third album, “Chief,” debuted at the top of the Billboard Top 200, and held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart for two weeks. In less than two months, the album was RIAA-certified gold.

Armed with that impressive calling card, the EMI staff worked to further turn radio’s perceptions around by getting as many programmers as possible to see Church’s live show, which KVOO Tulsa, Okla., PD Luke Jensen calls “un-freaking real. Pyro, lights, great music… he is for real,” Jensen enthuses.

In the first four years of his career, however, getting radio out to see Church was difficult. He was playing clubs, and rarely went onstage before 11 p.m., an hour Lange admits made it a little hard to get radio programmers to stay up for when they had to work the next day. When he began mixing his headlining shows with opening dates for Toby Keith and other artists, there began to be more opportunities to see him play at an earlier hour.
His growing support at radio tracked right alongside Church’s building consumer fan base.

“It started with a handful of radio programmer support, and it just kept growing and growing,” Lange says. “Once they experienced him live, and discovered what he was about… they became true fans.”

The EMI team also made sure as many programmers as possible got to spend time with Church and got to know him, partly in response to some early concerns from programmers that Church came across as not as overtly friendly as other artists.

Lange says she and her team initially got feedback from radio that Church was “a little mysterious. He’s kind of quiet… He’s a very private person,” she says. “A lot of people [wondered] ‘Is he rude?’ But he’s just a very private, quiet kind of guy, a very loyal person. When people started really spending some time with him, they [realized] this is a really great guy, a family guy with a huge heart who is just so passionate about what he does.

“He’s [also] a great interview,” she adds. “He’s very intelligent [and] he knows where he’s been and where he wants to get to.”

For all of those reasons, Lange says, “it took a little bit longer” to get Church to the top of the charts “just because of the way he went about it. He was all about the live show, and staying true to the music. It really did take a minute for people to [get] the whole Eric Church experience.”

With two top 10 Church singles to their credit already—2009’s “Love Your Love The Most” and 2010’s Hell On The Heart”—the EMI team had a good feeling from the start that “Chief’s” second single, “Drink In My Hand,” would go all the way. But label president/CEO Mike Dungan upped the ante by publicly stating (in an interview with Billboard Country Update early in the life of the record) that it would be Church’s first No. 1.

“I had my mandate to take it to No. 1, so failure was not an option,” Lange says with a laugh. “No pressure.”

The single zipped up the charts in a relatively speedy and largely drama-free 23 weeks, and Lange says the stars were finally in alignment. “Radio came on board, the press was there, the critics, the fans… They all came together.”

Helping speed things along was the good research stations were getting on the song.“Really from the very beginning, all the numbers we were getting back from everywhere were really, really strong,” says Lange. “The biggest thing at the end was we were getting some burn from people who were up over 1,000 spins on it. But we had great research on this thing for pretty much the run of the record.”

In the final push for No. 1, which the EMI promo team began setting up in December, Lange says, “unanimously we were backed up” by radio. “I felt like they were for us.

“That final week that we were going [for] No. 1, we knew we had everybody on board,” she continues. “Nobody was going to be hurting us. Everybody was in heavy where we needed them to be. Really by Thursday or Friday of that week before, we pretty much knew it looked really good. It was nice not having to stress all weekend about it.”

For Lange and her team, the experience of finally helping Church top the charts has been so rewarding.

“We all, from the beginning, saw the star quality in him,” she says. “That’s why we were going to stick with him until the rest of the world discovered him.”

As for Church’s reaction to his hit single, Lange says, “He is just so proud. He’s so excited and thankful to everyone that put so much work into this, because it takes a village, and he knows it. It just couldn’t have come at a more perfect time, launching this big tour that just started last [week]. He’s launching it with a big old No. 1 record. That’s awesome.”

The next single, “Springsteen,” goes for adds on Feb. 20, and Lange says already, “We’re having to hold people back” from playing it. “We are thrilled to, hopefully, continue this No. 1 trend.”