Eric Church has fans proclaiming "Hail to the 'Chief'" as his third album tops both the Country Albums chart and all-genre Billboard 200. Registering 145,000 albums sold, that figure is more than four times the first-week sales of his sophomore disc, 'Carolina,' which has since been certified gold, representing sales in excess of 500,000.

Eric's 'Chief' posted the highest first-week digital sales for a country release this year and is only the second country album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2011, following Blake Shelton's 'Red River Blue' last month. It's also the second-biggest debut week for a country album this year behind Brad Paisley's 'This Is Country Music.'

The good news just keeps coming for the North Carolina native, as his Top 15 single, 'Homeboy,' was recently certified gold. It's his third gold-certified single. Humbled by the reaction of fans and critics to the album, Eric notes that he's meticulous about crafting his albums.

"I don't know if other people think about it, but I'm obsessed with the order of the songs," Eric tells The Boot. "I think about the space between songs, because sometimes, it's a big rockin' song and the next one's a ballad, and you don't want to go right to it. You want to breathe a minute, then go to it. So I look at the spacing between them. You can get real anal and look, you'll see there are different spaces between the songs on the album. A lot of albums these days are uniform, ours aren't. We actually make them longer or shorter, depending on the songs."

Eric will be in Sacramento, Calif. on August 4, with Toby Keith. Keep track of his upcoming tour dates here.

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