Dressed in jeans and a Lakers tank top, his mustachioed face drenched with sweat, Zach Bryan recalled recording his song “Condemned” on Monday night as if it had taken place in some previous life: He was 23 years old. he told the crowd before him at Crypto.com Arena, as he and a friend used mattresses from an Airbnb to turn the venue into a makeshift studio.
In fact, Bryan cut the raw and plaintive “Condemned” just five years ago. Yet so much has happened to this former Navy weapons specialist (now one of music's biggest stars) so quickly that you can't blame him for looking back like a tattooed grandfather telling old stories of war.
Monday's concert was the second of three at the Lakers' downtown home, behind last year's “Zach Bryan,” which debuted atop the Billboard album chart the same week it produced a number one single in “I Remember Everything,” a sad duet with Kacey. Musgraves. In February, “I Remember Everything” (still a fixture today in the upper reaches of Spotify's Hot 100 and Top 50 in the US) earned Bryan his first Grammy Award; In March, no less a fan than Bruce Springsteen flew to New York in the middle of a string of West Coast dates to join the 28-year-old singer-songwriter onstage at Brooklyn's Barclays Center.
Zach Bryan takes the stage.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
The huge success Bryan has had since he started posting country-folk songs on Twitter and YouTube has helped pave a path to the pop charts for other rock-inclined white dudes: think Noah Kahan, Hozier and Benson Boone. In fact, Bryan's own audience has changed noticeably over the past two years, from a crowd that always supported the middle-aged Wilco parents to a much younger audience split almost evenly between men and women. (If in 2022 you were tempted to think that Bryan and Morgan Wallen represent opposite constituencies, you will no longer be tempted.)
Closely observed and clearly expressed – “18 years old, full of hate / They sent me in a caravan,” says the vivid opening of “East Side of Sorrow” – Bryan's songs are intimate meditations on work, family, romance and the peculiar. despair over the longing to leave a small town you love. However, he has figured out how to upsize himself for the arenas and stadiums he now plays in: Backed by a rowdy seven-piece band at Crypto, where a cross-shaped stage was placed in the middle of the floor, he invited the audience sing at full volume throughout the entire two-hour show, transforming private confession into an opportunity for shared catharsis.
Zach Bryan performs.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
In a sense, that's a departure from the personal scrutiny involved in pop stardom, a move in keeping with Bryan's general reluctance to fulfill the rituals of celebrity on any platform beyond his own. Time and time again on Monday night, the house lights came on precisely at the moment one might have expected Bryan to strike some rock god pose, drawing his attention to the thousands of people watching. . At one point, he even brought a fan on stage to sing and play guitar on his song “Heading South,” passing the baton to a version of the kid he used to be.
Yet Bryan also felt clear pleasure at having achieved such rarefied air: his vintage Lakers jersey commemorated the third NBA Finals title of the early 2000s; The night before he wore one of the second of those three championships. And for all the intensity of the crowd's howls, their voices never quite drowned out the jagged power of Bryan's singing, which if anything has grown more unruly as his success has brought him closer to the center of pop.
He ended the show, as he has with most of his current tour, with a boisterous run through his song “Revival,” for which he was joined (a la Taylor Swift circa “1989”) by a handful of friends and celebrities. -ish) people who included her girlfriend, podcaster Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia, and former UFC star Nate Diaz. As they wandered around the stage, pumping their fists and taking an endless series of selfies, Bryan motioned for Diaz to come to his microphone: a guy who couldn't believe where he'd found himself, eager to share the view. disorienting
