Zach Bryan's 'The Great American Bar Scene'
The men and women in his songs spend their twenties drinking their way through the alienating cities they’ve fled to from the small towns they’ve outgrown. They congregate in dive bars, break each other’s hearts, pound High Lifes, pop Zyn, ponder God, place parlays, rediscover their rural accents, act younger and feel older than they really are. The boys and girls in his America have such a , is to make it seem like the life he sings about is still the one he’s living.
The way Bryan wrestles with this contrast–between his newfound success and the homespun characters he writes about – and he wrestles with it quite a bit – is by leaning on remembrances of a recent restless past that’s never far from his mind. “Give me four minutes and a little ‘bit of time,” he sings on “Bass Boat,” another tune about his favorite topic: memory. “I’ll make them old days an old friend of mine.
These 19 songs feel like a batch of old friends largely because of Bryan’s other magical gift: his knack for absorbing and transforming his many influences into something that feels uniquely his own. He’s emerged as the foremost pop synthesizer of the past decade in singer-songwriter, country-rock, indie-folk, and heartland rock, blending his favorite Kings of Leon, Bon Iver, Turnpike Troubadours and Lumineers records into something that feels new to a younger audience.
But part of Bryan’s stunning commercial success may be that amidst all this influence-peddling, his closest songwriting contemporary is Taylor Swift, whose sui generis worldbuilding Bryan almost always pulls off for himself. Like Swift’s recent work, he uses silence and space to turn otherwise sparse records into stadium sing-alongs. And as a lyricist, he’s absorbed Swift’s knack for detail .
That Bryan’s latest would be even stronger if it were four songs shorter is beside the point. Among the many methods he’s absorbed from his pop contemporaries is the modern concept of the album as Annual Content Dump. This one’s cheerfully grandiose title is, unsurprisingly, a bait and switch: These are sad songs, small in scope and size .
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