Issue #33: Zach Bryan and the never-ending search for authenticity

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By Natalie

The 2023 word of the year, according to Merriam-Webster, is authentic. “We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” the dictionary’s editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski told the AP. “What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

The announcement is just a happy coincidence I discovered when I woke up today planning to write about Zach Bryan. I know you all know this (probably better than I do) but Bryan is the year’s third-biggest country-or-something-like-it artist according to Billboard and even bigger than that if you’re adjusting for both the vaguely grassroots (read: mostly outside of terrestrial radio) nature of his listenership and his critical esteem. He’s the latest in a long line of artists to claim the loaded superlative, “The Only Contemporary Country Artist The Ostensibly Non-genre Music Press Will Acknowledge Right Now.” Bryan’s marathon third album American Heartbreak appeared on nine best-of-2022 lists, and his latest self-titled release (which came out in August) will likely continue that trend.

Is he country? He, of course, eschews any genre designation and plenty of his peers are rolling their eyes that he gets labeled as such, but he’s on the country charts, showing up to the ACMs and CMAs, and ascending to the kind of stadium-sized success that is hard to find for a guy with a guitar these days if he’s not gone country. Over the course of his releases, Bryan has gradually introduced more explicit country signifiers, musically, lyrically and branding-wise: cowboy stuff, fiddles, wide-open spaces. At any rate we’re calling him country for the purposes of this newsletter, which tends to take the broadest possible view of that term.

More important to understanding why this particular guy with a guitar became the biggest thing since, well, the last guy with a guitar, is that word: authentic. It follows him around like lost puppy (or perhaps more aptly, an Oklahoma cop). To the people using it to describe him, I think it is meant as real, unvarnished and genuine — a sort of art without artifice. To imply that the songs are an exact reflection of his interior life, and the perfect salve in a world where country music — and music more broadly — might be saved, if only someone would sing true enough and real enough. (To his credit, he has tried to dissuade people of this notion; they’re still making TikTok videos decrying the perceived disloyalty to his girlfriend in his Hot 100 No. 1 single with Kacey Musgraves, “I Remember Everything.”)

I can hear the chorus now: “No, we like him because the songs are good!” I can finally say that I have listened to every last one of those songs (and there are so many), and yes, some of them are good. His songwriting on addiction is particularly evocative; I found “From a Lover’s Point of View” and “Mine Again” moving.

Their relentless sameness is a little much for me (funnily enough, he rebukes people who tell him his songs all sound the same at least twice in said songs). His favored tropes — sunsets, dark-haired girls with skin who grin, cars that still smell like smoke, being a small-town ne’er-do-well but in a sexy way — are not mine, the unchanging chugging of the same three chords becomes monotonous to my ear (Harlan Howard didn’t say you couldn’t introduce rhythm, after all). The overwhelming seriousness of it all — the sense that a tragedy is always just around the corner — does not feel true.

But back to the main question: why SO many people love him when his songs are not substantially different than any number of other Texan and Oklahoman songwriters working in Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt’s long shadows, and his style of singing and playing are so firmly in line with the lingua franca of both red dirt and contemporary Americana.

I think it does come back to that perception of authenticity, of a “realness” that is almost inherently adversarial: Zach Bryan is real and true, unlike [insert literally anyone else with a few notable exceptions]. In a world where — as Merriam-Webster implies with their choice for word of the year — so little seems honest and genuine with social media algorithms, bots, AI and more operating on deception, what could be more trustworthy than a man who writes, sings and produces his own music? It’s airtight, caulked and sealed against any gap where an outsider’s lies could come in and trick us into feeling something that’s not tied to reality. In the same way that the TikTok algorithm rewards people crying on camera, someone so hamfistedly insisting on their own emotions in song must be believed, because if we can’t trust that what else is there?

He embraces that adversarial, me-against-the-world sentiment in his songs: “They finally found out the hard way/That this sound I got is my mine, man,” he sings in “Highway Boys.” It bleeds into some of his more suspect assumptions about what “authenticity” means, and who exactly it’s for. “They'll never understand that boy and his kind/All they comprehend is a fucking dollar sign,” he sang on his breakout hit, “Heading South,” suggesting who “they” might be by describing their opposite. “Don't stop headin', headin' South/'Cause they will understand the words/That are pouring from your mouth.” It’s clearer still on “Highway Boys”: “To sing his songs true/They make a southern boy cry/Turn a northeast man confused.”

This is where the limitations of perceived authenticity as a musical quality come into focus. If Zach Bryan is real, and his realness is what makes him different, suddenly our window for what honest, true music is becomes incredibly narrow. Is collaboration deceptive? Is instrumental music fake? In his own lyrics, he’s playing on the idea that being Southern makes him more genuine, alluding to a broader, more uncomfortable truth about who exactly is allowed to be “authentic” and who will always be perceived as artificial.

His story is almost unbelievably perfect for an aspiring country star: he’s a white man from a small town in Oklahoma who served in the Navy until he was honorably discharged to pursue music. “If it was my decision, I would never get out of the worlds [sic] greatest Navy,” he posted on Instagram upon his discharge, almost implying that he is doing us all a service by playing music rather than becoming enormously wealthy while seemingly retaining full creative control of his work (which is, of course, great for him). His rise was almost entirely on YouTube. In lieu of the typical gauntlet of gigs, there are scores of pointedly unposed videos of him crooning in backyards and on porches. The videos of him singing his songs in fatigues are a core source of his believability — the idea that he didn’t even really want this, he just can’t help being talented. Wanting and striving are suspicious; Bryan is simply being.

It is sheer luck, then, that him being who he is happens to be the imagined American status quo, the most trustworthy of all citizens, the one you’d consult in a diner for a piece taking the temperature on flyover country in an election year: the rural, white, straight, American male (and a veteran to boot). It fits all too easily into a slew of myths that are oh-so-difficult to shake: the idea that open spaces with trees are more real than cities, that rural people are more honest than urbanites (hello, Hallmark Christmas movies), that songs sung by a white man holding a guitar are truer than the others — that artifice might be separated from the fundamentally transactional nature of making music for money (see also: Oliver Anthony). Why him and not all the other confessional singer-songwriter guys? A healthy dose of talent to be sure, and a story that tells us exactly what we want to hear.

None of this is to say Bryan is pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. I think he is who he says he is, and also that that’s the least interesting thing about him. There’s a bit of a studied outsider quality to his persona, more galaxy-brain pseudo-intellectual than plainspoken truth-teller — hence the proclaimed libertarianism and the insistence on exclusively promoting his latest album on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Hiding under that all-American country boy exterior is a kind of wannabe Kerouac from your freshman creative writing seminar; when I got to “Burn, Burn, Burn” — a reference to the most famous Kerouac quote — in his discography, I cackled.

To me, music is true if it makes you feel something; its practitioners real until proven to be AI, I suppose. Trying to gauge an artist’s authenticity is a trap, one that will lead you to believe art created in isolation is more righteous than that which is made together — among many other toxic myths. As far as ZB goes, there is honesty amid all that blustering truthiness. My favorite Zach Bryan song is (perhaps this is on-brand) the one where he’s doing a bit: “If She Wants A Cowboy” is a smart parody of Nashville country, complete with Autotune, in the form of a compelling, catchy song. But then again, I’ve never thought music needs saviors. It’ll keep showing us what’s real, whether we’re looking for that or not.