Bruce Springsteen, 40 years on from Born in the U.S.A., shows up on Bryan’s new album to offer the wisdom and regret of a lifetime of telling truths and spinning yarns.
, features love songs, thorny anthems, autobiographical lore and even a mini-arc that directly invokes classic Bruce Springsteen songs.Zach Bryan is an avid learner, always taking pains to credit his sources. Now a stadium-level star who hears his accounts of 21st-century unrest sung back to him by thousands of people every time he performs, he began his music-making life as a Naval petty officer uploading phone videos to YouTube and just wanting to do his idols proud.
As a mega-hit, “Born in the U.S.A.” made history by being misunderstood: The porousness of its relationship to patriotism made it seem like a nationalist anthem when it was really a protest song. This frustrated Springsteen, who publicly rejected Reagan’s advances and released ahumanizing veterans as resilient but suffering. Some stand in line at a payday lender, others laugh at a bar but display their injuries, still more lie buried in generic, white stone-marked graves.
Foremost among them is his experience as part of a military family. Born on a naval base in Japan, Bryan himself enlisted at 17 and served eight years before being honorably discharged to pursue his musical career. He did tours in Djibouti and Bahrain, apparently not seeing combat, but still entering into that experience as the American presence abroad is facing increasing global scrutiny.
This thread intertwines with his references to a sometimes troubled childhood and the ever-present threat of alcoholism to form a picture of American working-class life that fights against the sentimentalizing impulse that can also surface in Bryan’s writing.
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