Grammy-nominated singer Eric Church's viral commencement address at UNC-Chapel Hill urges graduates to embrace their unique individuality and tune out social media noise, likening life's essential elements to the six strings of a guitar.



A commencement address by Grammy-nominated singer Eric Church has gone viral for its emphasis on faith, family, and community, as well as its countercultural message urging graduates to embrace their unique qualities and tune out the noise and criticism of social media.

Church made the comments during the spring commencement ceremony Saturday at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he held a guitar and played it throughout his speech, comparing music to life and explaining that the instrument’s six strings – much like the different parts of a person’s life – can be powerful together.

The six strings of life, he said, are faith, family, marriage, ambition, community, and individuality.

“Social media is going to show you 1,000 versions of a life that looks better than yours. The comparison will be relentless, curated, and a lie dressed up in really good lighting. Someone's comments, someone's criticism, someone's cold opinion is going to try to convince you to retune yourself to match what they think you should sound like. Do not let them touch your string,” he said, according to a RealClearPolitics transcript.

“You were made uniquely, wonderfully, distinctly. There's a sound only you can make, a voice that has never existed before you and will never exist again, a contribution only you can bring, a way of seeing that belongs only to you. The world does not need another cover song. It needs an original.”

Faith, he said, will carry graduates through life’s trials.

“Your faith is the low ‘E’ of your life, the thing that sits at the very bottom of you. Your belief about what this life is for, what you owe, what holds the universe together when science reaches the edge of its own explanation and shrugs.

“The people who tend to their faith in ordinary seasons do not come undone in extraordinary ones. They still hurt. They still sit in hospital waiting rooms asking unanswerable questions at 3 in the morning. But they have a foundation to return to. The world will try to untune this string through busyness, through slow accumulation of a full schedule, a full inbox, a full life. Listen to me: Tend to your faith, not just when you're broken, but when you’re whole.”

Family, he said, is built on sacrifice and loyalty.

“Look around. Somewhere in that crowd is someone who has loved you longer than you've been easy to love. It’s true,” he told the graduates. “Someone who saw you at your actual worst, not your public-facing worst, and didn't leave you. Someone who worked a job they didn't love to put a book in your hands, you sometimes didn't open. Someone who sat alone in a quiet house and cried the weekend you moved into dorms and wondered, ‘Have I done enough?’ That is family.”

He urged the graduates: “Call your people, not when there's news, but when there's nothing. Show up when it costs you something. Let them see you when things are hard. [This] is not a holiday string. It's an everyday string. Protect it.”

Meanwhile, Church said today’s graduates face unique pressures that previous generations never encountered.

“Your generation faces a temptation no generation before has ever faced: the temptation to perform for everyone and belong to no one, to be globally visible and locally invisible, to have thousands of followers and no one who actually knows where you live.

“Resist this. Plant yourself somewhere. Put down roots with the full intention of growing there. Learn the actual names, not usernames, of the people around you. Volunteer. Coach the team. Build the thing your community needs, even if the Internet will never see it. Generosity is not something you do after you make it. It's how you make it.”

Source