Zach Bryan, who is the new king of country and why are we talking about him?

When the Warner Music Record Labels they decided to send one of the songs from “The great american bar scene”, “Pink skies,” Zach Bryan rants on X (formerly Twitter): “Fuck, I never approved of this. Why is ‘Pink skies’ played on pop radio? I’m not a fucking pop artist, leave me out of this shit. ‘Pink skies’ is not a pop song.”.

Two years ago, the New York Times, reporting on the enormous success that the album “American Heartbreak” was enjoying overseas, a 34-song country-folk work that marked the debut of the former US Navy soldier in 2022, not by chance nicknamed it “.music’s most reluctant new star”. Zach Bryan, the second brightest star of the new American country scene, behind Morgan Wallen (but be careful: he has already signalled to overtake him), is a character to be told. The release of her new album “The great american bar scene”, which hit streaming platforms on Friday, July 4, the day Americans celebrate their most heartfelt holiday (Independence Day), was loaded with a lot of expectations. “Something in the orange”, one of the songs on the album “American heartbreak”, became the longest-running country song on the Billboard Hot 100 this centurywith over 100 weeks on the charts. The 2022 album is still on the Billboard 200, the chart of best-selling albums in the US: it has been there for forty-four weeks. And then with his songs and his attitude Bryan has divided and made the American public opinion discuss. There are no half measures: on one side there are those who hate him, on the other there are those who love him. In any case, In two days, “The great american bar scene” has surpassed 30 million total streams on Spotify: expectations more than satisfied.

Zach Bryan’s is a gripping story. He joined the Navy when he was just 17 years old.son of two parents both in the military (his mother gave birth to him on the Okinawa Islands, in Japan, where she was serving in the spring of 1996), only to later be discharged in 2021 to be able to follow his passion for music, when those first videos published on YouTube began to rack up too many views for what was supposed to be just a game: “If it had been up to me, I would never have left the greatest navy in the world, but they kindly gave me an honorable discharge to go and play some music around.

I don’t know if I’m a coward or if I’m chasing a dream, but the best eight years of my life were spent serving the best country in the world,” he wrote on social media. His name began to circulate among country fans between 2019 and 2020, thanks to two self-produced albums such as “DeAnn”, dedicated to his mother who passed away prematurely, and “Elisabeth”. The .success that started “from the bottom” culminated with the signing with one of the three major record companiesWarner Music, which in 2022 sent the third album “American heartbreak” to the stores, but found itself having to deal with a a character who is, to say the least, sharp and rude: “I don’t have a big explanation for these songs, I don’t have a shitty launch plan to get it to as many people as possible. I just wrote some poems and songs that I want to share because I think they’re special,” he said when introducing that album.

Zach Bryan is a true outsider. And an anti-system, who prefers direct contact with the public, through noisy and noisy live performances, to relationships filtered through social media or interviews – he grants very few. Two years ago the singer-songwriter released a live EP entitled “All my homies hate Ticketmaster“, pointing the finger against the giant that currently controls much of the ticket market in the US For his 2023 “Burn Burn Burn Tour,” Bryan has taken a series of actions to prevent the resale of tickets on secondary ticketing sites and has also ensured that all tickets are reasonably priced.

The most expensive ones cost $156. Not a small sum, but still far from the average of superstars who exceed 30 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Before the release of “The great american bar scene”, which also featured two rock heavyweights like .John Mayer (in “Better days”) and Bruce Springsteen (in “Sandpaper”: “Thank you for making life a dream when I was a kid. A reason to believe,” he wrote on X posting a photo of the Boss), the 28-year-old American singer-songwriter has selected about twenty bars between the US and Canada, making appointments with a few fans to let him listen to the songs from the album in advance. “My intention,” he wrote on social media, “is to be able to give everyone a taste of the album, but above all to bring people together in a special moment. I have chosen 23 bars across the country that embody the spirit of American culture. These bars will play songs selected from ‘The great american bar scene’. I would love to play in these bars, but it won’t be possible.”

The large-scale success of last year’s album “Zach Bryan”, which literally depopulated in the States, exceeding 2 billion streams on Spotify, It has attracted criticism from early fanswho accused Zach Bryan of being essentially a “sold”. The most classic of stories. He didn’t give weight to those criticisms: he responded with the 19 songs contained in “The great american bar scene”. In “Lucky enough”, the song – between sung and recited – that opens the album, he says: “My heart still aches and my hands still work / and I’m still just a sinful man”.