Zach-Bryan-billboard-chart, The singer-songwriter, whose music crosses genre borders, also has the first rock release to top the Billboard 200 in over a year.
Zach Bryan” had the equivalent of 200,000 sales in the United States, including 233 million streams.Credit…Rob Grabowski/Invision, via Associated Press.
Zach Bryan, the Oklahoma-raised singer-songwriter whose work fits somewhere on a continuum of country, rock, and Americana folk, has logged his first No. 1 album and single with big streaming numbers.
His album, “Zach Bryan,” opens at the top of the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 200,000 sales in the United States. That includes 233 million streams and 17,000 copies sold as digital downloads, according to the tracking service Luminate.
Critics and playlist curators may quibble over exactly which genre tags to attach to Bryan’s work. But for chart purposes, Billboard has applied a straightforward test, ruling that “Zach Bryan” counts as both country and rock since Bryan’s work has appeared on both its country and rock charts. As such, “Zach Bryan” is the first rock album to top the chart in over a year, since the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Unlimited Love” early last year, and it has the biggest streaming week ever for a rock album. (Among country releases, Billboard reported, Bryan’s album has the fifth-largest debut streaming week.)
In addition, Bryan notches his first No. 1 single on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 chart. “I Remember Everything,” Bryan’s duet with Kacey Musgraves, takes over from Oliver Anthony Music’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which falls to No. 6 after two weeks at the top.
Four songs into his very ambitious, very serious self-titled album, Zach Bryan anticipates some criticism. “Do you ever get tired of singin’ songs/Like all your pain is just another fuckin’ singalong?” he asks in “East Side of Sorrow,” one of the record’s many full-throated singalongs about a painful subject. By this point in the record, the 27-year-old songwriter has already recited a poem about the nature of fear and included a brief electric guitar interpolation of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He’s also shared a stark reflection on a road trip with a sick loved one and delved into his past as a Navy vet, rhyming “fight a war” with “don’t even know what you’re fighting for.”
It sounds heavy—and it is heavy. So why does Zach Bryan feel like a breath of fresh air? For all his high-stakes musings on life, love, and death, sung in a gruff, boyish howl that makes even just the word “child” sound like a stifled sob, Bryan has a lot of fight in him. A growing force on both the country and rock charts, he is a reluctant celebrity whose reluctance only makes him seem more like a celebrity, all while maintaining a focus on songwriting as a pure, unfiltered outlet for telling his story. “I’m too writing-driven to be a big star,” he told The New York Times last year. “I’m not meant for it.” And while he was being interviewed about American Heartbreak, his platinum-selling, star-making, 34-song major-label debut, he did have a point. Self-produced and written almost entirely without co-writers, his follow-up, Zach Bryan, lives proudly in its own world, for better or worse.
Listening to Bryan’s songs, it’s clear why he’s thriving on country radio. Even with his stripped-back arrangements, he’s got a knack for memorable, meaty hooks that take you down the backroads beside him with the radio blasting. This gift is especially evident in “Hey Driver,” whose chorus about small towns and fine women is so big and fun that guest vocalist Michael Trotter Jr. of the War and Treaty can’t seem to stop belting the harmony part, getting louder and more soulful with each repetition. By the end of the song, Bryan has muted his own delivery to an uncharacteristic speak-sing, seemingly distracted by the effect his melodies have on the people around him. You can picture him closing his eyes tightly, imagining how it will feel when the whole crowd joins in.
In moments like these, Bryan sounds like a pop star, but he still works firmly in the tradition of old-school country songwriting. Just the opening verse of “I Remember Everything,” a winning ballad featuring Kacey Musgraves, alludes to rotgut whiskey and an ’88 Ford, daddy and mama, and the inherited wisdom that “grown men don’t cry.” Raised in Oologah, Oklahoma, Bryan never tires of surveying the emotional landscape of his childhood and the effect it’s had on his young adulthood. From his time in the Navy to his unlikely ascent on the charts to the death of his mother in 2016, he has become a master at casting the facts of his life as hard-won pep talks: The proper opener, “Overtime,” is a rousing and self-aware underdog anthem, incorporating the closest thing this album has to a joke with a sample from a recent Barstool Sports fan interview. And yet occasionally Bryan stumbles when placing himself in a larger narrative about old souls in a modern world: “I wish I was a tradesman,” he tries late in the album, “learning from some beat-down old layman.”
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