Zach Bryan Meets Bruce Springsteen: ‘I Never Thought I’d Be Sitting Here With You’

Songwriting's hard.

No way.

I'm just kidding, me too.

I don't think I felt really comfortable with the idea that I was writing good songs until I was about 22 or 3 when I came coming up with the songs for my first record, a record called Greetings from Asbury Park.

Do you ever think Asbury Park is a small town?

Do you ever feel like no matter where you go, like you were saying earlier, you're always going to have that in your heart and your soul?

Period. Period.

I feel like everything is trying to be on top of other music, competition-wise when it comes to like awards and things like that.

But when I listen to your music, it's like it seems timeless.

And I wonder when you were 23 or 24 if you knew that was going to happen, you know?

Because that record, Greetings from Asbury Park, we still listen to it to this day as like 20, 25,

30

-year-olds and we're like, I still feel like this.

I was acting like I thought it was going to happen, you know, because I didn't have a plan B.

I only had plan a which is I'm gonna be a musician our course was our courses were opposite

Because I didn't even want to get out of the Navy They were making me get out of the Navy and I was like I can't do this

That's

what I've been

really curious about is how I didn't have Another life. I had no other real experiences as a musician since I was 14 years old and playing performing live since i was 15 you know so i was kind of like i was in in invested in writing the best music i could and okay with whatever that outcome that's how i still feel yeah to

this day and it's mind-blowing to think like the more you think you're okay with whatever's like happening and you're content with where you're at it seems the bigger it gets and i'm not saying that arrogant it's weird columbia records came to me while i was in the navy and they're like hey you want to go to a steak dinner and at that point i was in the navy and i couldn't afford a steak dinner and i was like hey at least i get a steak dinner out of this and that sounds like you're stone pony you're like ah whatever happens it

was like hey i'm gonna do this and whatever the outcome is is what the outcome is going to be but i knew i had to play i had to write and and whether it was like you know we were doing three nights a week in a club in asbury park and uh you know bringing home 150 bucks a week or $250 a week and living on that you know quite a bit

back then

yeah I remember like I was happy you know I was happy at the I was like gee I was making music for a living which I didn't know if many other people who were now let me get this straight you didn't do your first public performance till 2019 this

is funny because when I was in the Navy one time there's a potbelly subs it's like a franchise sub place they call me and they're like hey we do like live music you should come oh I got it you should come play all day for like nine hours so I remember playing that nine hours I was just playing covers and they gave me a $60 check I got it I was like I'm a professional musician oh I made it cool and that

was it for me

that

was the only

time I performed and outside of the

2017

maybe

and you never publicly performed except no they threw us into the fire we played at the pageant and it was like 2,000 2,500 people and I was like i can't there's no way i can do this and then i did and i was like oh wait maybe i can further myself a little bit more and we went a little bigger and bigger and bigger now we're here so it's interesting to hear your mindset on it because

it feels well what i got mind boggling is if your first public performance was like 29 or 2070 and you are selling out two nights at barclays and and in newark and and you have some stadium gigs coming don't you

yep

this is crazy

It's us too, because the guys in my band are the same dudes I went to high school with.

So when we see the tour and we're like, what happened?

How long have you been touring?

Touring, well, I was signed in 1973, so that's 50 years ago.

That was when I got my record deal.

It's insane.

To think about that, we've been doing it for like four years now.

I'm 28, and I'm like, there's no way I can continue on, man.

I'm dying.

There's no way I can carry on.

There's no way, yeah.

There was a quote, I think, in your book.

I know with Nebraska, I was interested in making myself as invisible as possible.

I just wanted to be another ghost.

On that record, it spoke to some need in me.

As a result of the success that I had, I needed to know if I could go back and be nobody.

Right.

My idea was, I'm going to slow this down a little bit.

I'm in the exact place right now.

in

my

writing and career yeah i'm like oh wow i've really came out of the gate fast you

did

i've really risen fast unbelievable but now at this point i can't even catch my own back wind yeah not in a bad way either not like it just feels like i put so much music out people have read into it so much but in reality i was just writing music and these characters and now i gotta slow down and

hone in

you know i'm like

you gotta listen to your inner voice you know that That's really important.

And so when Nebraska came along, initially it was just like, I just want to put some songs down.

And so I ended up with these, my demos, you know, and then I kept trying to make them better.

And every time I tried to make them better, they got worse.

Every time I tried to make it sound better, it was worse.

I have this, the cut born in the USA.

I know this thing is lightning in a bottle because I can tell.

Oh, we know.

we know then i have i have my devos from nebraska there's an all i have an audience what my main thing is i want to do right by them you know and uh uh and and so i just the more i kept listening to these to my quote demos the more i said this is my next record and it also But it also gave me a sense of control over where I was going.

So you wanted to put out a record that you knew wouldn't be a hit to the masses, right?

That's right.

I felt like that with my last album.

That's right.

If I produce this pretty kind of weird, people are going to really hate it.

And they didn't.

No arrogance either.

I wanted to slow.

That's good.

I know it is.

I know it is.

But I wanted to slow things down enough.

And I was inspired by Nebraska and all those things.

And I was like, oh, if I just do something weird, all of my country fans, all of my indie fans would just be pissed and be like, who's this guy?

And I could control my own life for a second, you know?

Did it work with Nebraska?

Did it slow things down?

Or did it just build that

cult?

Well, it did a little bit of what you're both of what you're talking about.

It did kind of slow things down in the sense we just put the record out.

And I let the record.

I said, no, I just want this to be what it is.

Had its own voice.

I didn't want to put whatever my public persona was at that moment in front of the music that's right and so in a way I always think your records are premonitions this

is crazy that you're saying that

yeah they're premonitions of what's going to be coming up in your consciousness and you're coming up out of your subconsciousness in the immediate aftermath of of what you created so I did struggle a lot during that period of time and

it probably wasn't normalized because the American bravado attached your music

Yeah, like that

like manliness attached to all your music You probably didn't feel like you were you could be comfortable on your own like mental to

know. I was feeling that

Conflict myself of being two different people, you know, and so but that makes you good at it. It's what's hilarious Well, it it gives you a it gives your work of breath

that is unusual you know I mean it was unusual to go from a record like Nebraska and then born in the USA which which I knew I knew was gonna be a popular record but I had no idea it was gonna be what it was you know the one thing I say is your band the band is really good so I was curious where your band came from

so we have the same story essentially like the hometown thing my music wasn't really that big yet I hadn't played one live show so I was like I was in such a transient moment of my life and I'm like this

blows my mind

looking back I was like to

be here right now is even more mind-numbing but I

I get home and I call all my best friends from high school who had put all their instruments down their drums their guitars their and I'm like hey guys I need a band and I don't trust anybody I don't trust anybody it's

good I trust you

guys you guys can barely play a few instruments

and one one of my best friends quit his job as a teacher one of my best friends quit his job as a metal technician one of my like everyone just quit their jobs and we went we got in my super duty truck and drove to the iowa state fair and played our first show oh my god and it was to this day i still have ptsd from it it was the most terrifying experience of my life because we didn't even rehearse we're just like let's do this and there was 1500 000 people there and i'm like I'm gonna make a fool of myself and and they only got better and better and my

fiddle player I tweeted out one day in all caps I go

well it's just I put an ad in the newspaper really same thing I

tweeted out I need a fiddle player this guy's wife sends me DMS this guy plays a fiddle I'm like sure come along he's good best

yeah the interesting thing that you said is that you needed people you could trust oh

we've been we talked about it

yeah more than you needed somebody who was a professional this talented professional that that was the same thing hey my guys they were people who I felt comfortable around there were people who I knew I could be myself around and there were people who I knew would keep me being myself I

bet you have this with the e-street band too but every single one of those guys know that I put their friendship and their trust before I put what we're doing on the stage

yeah

every night I find this interesting when i went and came and saw you at the wells fargo center and your band was performing and i have all this history with my band all these deep stories that are so important to us and like matter so

much yeah

like i wonder if you had the same stories outlining all of y'all's relationships and then to see you guys 30 40 years later i'm like this is just how it works

yeah it is how it works and i'll tell you the first thing that happens the first thing we do when we get together we haven't been in a while you tell stories oh

yeah that's that's a point of life on the bus this guy that guy what happened to you know

and that's been going on for the entire 50 years we've been together because those are the those are the things you have in common

that's our dream and at this point we're like at this quitting tour time i i

i i wish you as much joy and uh and adventure and success as as we've had how have you come to sort through what you want your record to sound like now

me and the guys we're always we're still experimenting we're like how do we make something that resonates with us but also will be enjoyed by other people right when I first started making music it was me and my best friend my best friends in the Navy and I'd been putting videos online which is probably different from back in the day but I was putting them on Twitter and I woke up one morning and had all these shares and I'm like oh no what I do and my buddy Alba we were on a plane one day and he goes hey you have to record these songs and i'm like says who why me and like six guys were like what are we even doing and uh we get into this airbnb we obviously were like seven beers in all

of us we think we're geniuses we're like we're gonna be we're gonna be the next springsteen let's do this at the time it was a joke and that's not how we feel now but like it was like we were listening to your stuff on the we're like so we get into this airbnb and there's all these beds and couches and we're taking an airbnb's cushions and like nailing them to the walls and we're like taping these we're taping all these mattresses to the walls and i had nothing to do with it these are all my friends they know that i went viral on twitter and they're like no we have to do this and i'm like you guys are fucking crazy and uh i end up sitting on this stool in between

like a cushion here a mattress here a mattress here and we record 12 songs straight across for 48 hours we were just drinking beer smoking cigarettes and like recording music and the next day we had all these recordings and uh i had them on my phone i'm like okay so what do i do with these and so i put all this music on the internet not knowing what was about to happen and the next week of my life was like just absolute chaos that's

mind-boggling and it

was like above it was above all these these number one hits on like on the apple music charts and things i had all these people following me on like social media i had all these people calling me i had i had columbia records calling me a week after really this all happened within a month two months yeah this

is like something i've never heard of

and i went so we had all these we had all these cushions and mattresses nailed up on this wall this airbnb we had caused permanent damage this place and i'm recording like um godspeed or something and the owner of the airbnb walks in

he's like what are you guys doing and we're like nothing don't worry about it and to this day you can go online and look at the airbnb review oh really it says uh yeah zb's a kind kind guy messed up cushions

how deep into your new record are you

there's 14 songs but like i'm not sure how i want to record a lot of them and i just don't know right now but this is the first time of my life where i've given my time myself time not to know where i'm really thinking about it you know

where have you been recording the new stuff

that's what's funny some of them are on my phone and some of them are at electric lady and some of them are full productions here and some of them are in fields and some of them are i don't have the i don't have the uh i want to have the state power to be like i'm gonna make this a studio album and go record it like born to run or like uh-huh well

you're doing everything you're doing so far is right so

i know hopefully it keeps it hopefully it stays that way but

oklahoma's son i love that song and what you can't hide where you're from with nightcrawler blood on your cast and thumb that's good i appreciate you can fight and fiend and sell your guns but you'll always be in oklahoma but that kind of detail that night crawl where'd that come from where that where those lines do

you ever think asbury park is a small town yeah i do do you ever feel like no matter where you go like you were saying earlier you're always going to have that in your heart and your period period i felt like that i felt like that last year at a point

the level of detail and the maturity in your writing is just it's just amazing you know in

used cars this

guy's

you were talking about your mom she's yeah

she's fingering

her wedding band well that's you know that's where i get stuff like that is is lines from men like yourself you know is that real did that really happen you remember being a kid and looking at your mom like kind of well

the

finger i

mean some of the detail just came out of being a writer i think the the the touching of the of the ring that's just it's just writing you know

it's hard to explain that to people sometimes

that's

where you came up with something like the

hey you're a songwriter you're a writer that's how it happens you know that's how you process information when

i listen to your music it's it they're pretty much i'm not insulting your your genre but when i listen to your music i'm like if you put different production to this it's a country song all right

right there's a lot that's

why i don't want to be a country musician that's fascinating

i don't want to be a country

musician everyone calls me it i want to be a songwriter yeah and you're you're you're quintessential a songwriter like no one calls bruce springsteen hate to use your name in front of you but like no one calls bruce springsteen a freaking rock musician

yeah

which you are one but

you're also

a indie musician you're also a country musician like you're all these things encapsulated in one man and that's what songwriting is yeah so

it's it's sorry for no it's it's interesting because i know that you've been connected to the country genre which i which i can hear but if you go and see the show uh

there's so much, and I don't want to call it rock energy, just energy in your performance that you really bust all those boundaries, those different genre boundaries down, you know?

How much was Born in the USA, my hometown, and things derived from your dad, and how much was it derived from, like, paying attention to the people around you?

Well, I...

Did you ever combine the two?

Just kind of...

All the time.

I mean, you use everything.

Everything you know and everything you've seen and have seen.

My dad was troubled and lived a really sort of hardscrabble blue collar.

There was something about his pain that I felt I needed to communicate.

Wow.

The body of my work really comes out of a feeling I had for my father's life and my mother's

life.

That's why I released Deanne.

That's for my mom.

Yeah, it's a beautiful song.

Gorgeous song for you.

But the whole record, she had passed away.

And I was like, how do I keep her name alive?

Right.

That's why

I thought songs

would keep her name alive forever.

That's

lovely.

Which was cool.

And it's not like a sympathetic thing either.

I was like, how do I keep her name around my own life forever?

And it was that.

That's nice.

It was cool.

So when you said that.

Really lovely.

That's beautiful.

Yeah.

The way you just put that is something I've always searched for.

I love singing songs about my mom.

So I'm like,

if

it wasn't who she was, I wouldn't be who I was.

Beautiful.

Same with your father, probably, writing all those songs about him.

You're like, oh, if I sing this about him, it feels like he might be around for, he will be now.

Yeah, he is, you know, and it was a way that centered our relationship

and she heard things that we couldn't talk about but I could write about in a song.

And then amazingly enough, you know, I remember I said, hey, Pops, what's your favorite songs?

hmm the ones about me that was what he told me what

were your dad's favorite songs

that's what he said no he said the ones about me that was my dad

apart from you did he ever when you got when you became a oh

yeah musician

did your dad ever listen to music and it's what

was your they didn't listen to rock i mean they didn't like sinatra and you know uh and and my music Well, as Martin was just saying, really, when I was right about your age, I started to listen to country music, Hank Williams, a lot of Johnny Cash.

Because it was huge,

right?

Yeah.

Dylan

too?

Of course, yeah.

Wow.

He was an enormous influence, you know.

But all these guys were.

and really darkness on the age of town the river the song wreck on the highway from that record and then nebraska were really a result of me finally processing my country influences in a way that i felt comfortable with

wow you

know

that's that's where i'm at in my own career right now

yeah i

love country music and i want to like

you can do whatever you want man you're you're in the right place.

You bet.

That's insane to hear from you.

We're great, man.

It's fucking awesome.

I

can talk to you all day, man.

Easy day.