Zach Bryan’s “Born in the USA”.
Right-wing country is left-wing rock, one might simplify by paraphrasing Giorgio Gaber. With one substantial difference: today, rather than asking “what is the right, what is the left”, as our singer-songwriter did, the debate seems stuck in a permanent polarization between factions. And it is precisely this fracture that affects contemporary country, a genre historically associated with the “classic” values of conservative, wasp and white America, but which has long been crossed by figures who do not hide liberal or openly progressive positions, such as Jason Isbell.
Then there’s Zach Bryan, who is both the product and the victim of one cultural war which also passes – and above all – through music. Bryan has just released “With heaven on top”, an album immediately available in two versions: a “standard” one, with an often full sound, electric guitars and wind instruments, and a second entirely acoustic version put into circulation a few days later, surprisingly. A choice that the artist himself commented with a touch of irony towards his critics, explaining that he wanted to please “those strange audiophiles who always complain and who only want me to have voice and guitar, despite the work I do on my music”.
Beyond the controversy, the album contains the complete version of “Bad news”, the song that a few weeks ago – circulating only in fragments on social media – had put Bryan at the center of a heated clash with the Maga area. The reason: a text that sounded like an attack on ICE, the federal immigration agency linked to the harshest policies of the Trump administration, which has once again come under fire in recent days for the killing of an unarmed woman in Minneapolis. “Bad news” is a great little masterpiece: Bryan tells of a wounded and contradictory America, in which the colors of the flag are faded, without slogans and without proclamations, but for this reason easily misunderstandable in an already incandescent climate: “I heard the cops came / Cocky motherfuckers, ain’t they? / And ICE is gonna come bust down your door / Try to build a house no one builds no more / But I got a telephone / Kids are all scared and all alone”, Bryan sings.
A former career soldier who grew up in Oklahoma, Zach Bryan has become one of the most popular faces of the new country wave thanks to a direct, diaristic style and writing that focuses on individuals and communities rather than flags. His path has also been marked by important collaborations: from the one with Bruce Springsteen in “Sandpaper”, released in summer 2024, up to the recent live interpretation of “Atlantic City”, then released as a single. Even if the history of the two is profoundly different, it is not difficult to understand why the Boss (mentioned directly in “Bad news”) took him under his wing: Bryan is a thoroughbred storyteller, someone who tells the stories of the average American man, as Springsteen often did.
“With heaven on top” arrives after 2022 with “American heartbreak”, a monumental 34-song country-folk opera, welcomed with enthusiasm by the public, a success replicated by “The great american bar scene”. A fame welcomed with a certain reluctance by Bryan himself, who never loved the idea of becoming a star and had rebelled against the logic of the media and industry, and also against the idea of being associated with this or that political party.
And this is where the parallel with Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” becomes inevitable: the Boss’ anthem was the story of a war veteran’s disappointment, a theme that also appears in “Bad news”. And both are songs that get stretched one way or the other. The difference is that Bryan today moves in the ecosystem of social media and instant reactions, and of an even more marked polarization, even if it is difficult to reduce it to rock or country, right or left.
“With heaven on top” thus confirms Zach Bryan as a maverick: an author who continues to move within the language of traditional country, but expanding its narrative and musical horizons, without automatically accepting its classical horizon. For this reason alone it deserves to be listened to.
