Zach Bryan has recently burst onto the country music scene. His outstanding emotion that he puts into his songwriting and his singing is unlike any other. “Something in the Orange”, Zach’s mega hit that recently broke the record for the most consecutive weeks in the charts for a country song at 65 weeks, really put Bryan onto the map. After putting out this song, some people began to think Zach would become a one hit wonder. However, Zach put down all of those speculations after releasing his third studio album titled American Heartbreak containing 33 songs and one poem.
On May 20th 2022, Zach Bryan released one of the greatest country albums since the start of 2000. The marriage of upbeat songs like “Heavy Eyes” mixed with songs that could make even Chuck Norris shed a tear such as “She’s Alright”, is nothing short of amazing. After the release of the album Zach had become somewhat quiet on social media. It stayed this way until the release of the single “Dawns” with Maggie Rogers, yet another song where Zach uses his incredible songwriting to tell a story of a breakup. On May 10th, Zach started the Burn, Burn, Burn tour. This tour has been going on throughout all of 2023 with its last show being December 30th. During this tour Zach announced the release of his latest self-titled album, Zach Bryan.
Released Friday, August 25th, Zach’s fans sent Spotify for a doozy. At exactly 12:00 am, millions upon millions of Zach’s fans rushed to Spotify to listen to the album and it ended up crashing the app. Containing 15 songs and 1 poem, Zach Bryan gives you a little bit of everything. Starting off the album with “Fear and Friday’s” (Poem), Zach talks about the incredibly feats of his life and the ups and downs that life can throw at you. The first song off of the album, “Overtime”, is more of an upbeat tune in which Zach is singing about how he has been doubted throughout his entire and how he proves all his haters wrong by putting in more work and emotion into his songwriting than anyone out right now.
Zach experiments with many different instruments that he hasn’t used a lot in the past. The trumpets used in “Overtime” and “East Side of Sorrow” are newer to Bryan’s sound, however he uses them perfectly. Zach uses the piano a lot more as the main instrument in more songs than usual, like “Jake’s Piano-Long Island” and “Tourniquet”. The way that Zach uses the harmonica not only paints a haunting picture but also a hopeful one.
On this album Zach used more features than usual and these features absolutely knew their assignment. The first feature that we get to hear is the War and Treaty on the song “Hey Driver”. Michael Trotter Jr.’s voice compliments Zach’s voice on this song perfectly. The next one that we hear is Sierra Ferrell on “Holy Roller” Her voice once again works in perfect harmony with Zach’s. The next feature we get the pleasure of listening to is six time Grammy winner Kacey Musgraves on the song “I Remember Everything”. Kacey and Zach tell an incredible story of what seems to be a now broken up couple reminiscing on all of the great times they had together. After Kacey, The Lumineers appear on the song “Spotless”. Zach and The Lumineers talk about how nobody in the world is going to be perfect whether in a relationship or just living.
However, I think that the most impressive part of this album is the amount of people that disagree on its best song. Obviously, there will be a song that has more streams than the others. Currently that song is “I Remember Everything” with Kacey Musgraves. The song is absolutely deserving of every stream that it gets, but it was set up to get more plays because it is featuring Kacey Musgraves. Whereas a song like “Smaller Acts” is simply just Zach, his phone, his guitar, and a frog croaking in the background. Despite the lack of production this song has Zach’s fans love it because of the emotion he puts into the writing. This “problem” also occurred on American Heartbreak, but instead of having only 15 songs to choose from the people had 33. This has been something that Zach has done on every album he has produced and it is extremely impressive.
This album was an absolute masterpiece by Zach and did not disappoint. Zach recently announced his tour for 2024 which I’m sure will do absolutely incredible numbers. In sum, Zach is simply the best currently and I see his popularity only growing from now on.
