ALBUM RATING: 9.5/10
Zach Bryan’s American Heartbreak, his latest full album released in May 2022, contains a whopping 34 tunes. This collection of songs primarily reflects on the intertwined feelings of love and loss, and learning to appreciate the small moments of joy in life. Since the launch of his debut album in 2019, fans continue to praise Bryan for his lyrical skills and ability to simultaneously evoke powerful feelings of nostalgia, comfort, and heartbreak. This album further highlights his lyrical prowess and cements his current standing as one of the best storytellers in country music.
The album begins on a soft note with Late July, reminiscing on Bryan’s experience touring away from home and missing his loved ones: “I heard life is what passes when you’re too busy living / And love is at its finest when times are hard.” This song invites the listener to hit pause on the daily stresses of life and let the rest of the album take their worries away, almost like an opening hymn preparing the congregation for the remainder of the worship.
Following in similar fashion, songs such as Younger Years remind the listener to appreciate their friends and live in the moment: “A few good friends on the longest night, gettin’ high until we cry / Enjoyin’ all the pain of younger years”. As the album progresses, this appreciation slowly expands to include soulmates in Sun to Me: “I’ve seen hard timеs, bad luck, all that in-between / Sweetest of the sunflowеrs, yeah, you’re the sun to me”. Bryan takes a deep dive into these perfectly imperfect romances and how anything is worth it for the right person.
However, all good things must come to an end. Highway Boys tells the tale of the few friends who stuck together throughout the entire journey: “Highway boys on the road tonight / Got a gig out at the Ryman / They finally found out the hard way / That this sound I got is mine, man”. Other tunes pull at heartstrings such as She’s Alright, From Austin, and a beautiful rendition of You Are My Sunshine. Throughout the album, Bryan shares stories that surely resonate with any listener. He masterfully expresses in writing the hopes, dreams, and fears of an individual still searching for themselves.
Bryans’s broken voice combined with the acoustic mixture of guitar, pulsing drum beat, and any instrumentation from fiddle to harmonica absorbs the listener into the bittersweet world that Bryan describes, which feels so distant yet so familiar. In his concluding track, a musical poem entitled This Road I Know, Bryan states: “I don’t know where I am but I know exactly where I am.” No phrase better describes Bryan’s music and the memories that his words help resurface. Life contains a mixture of good times and bad times, but Bryan assures that we all arrive right where we belong.
I love the way you chose to depict Zach Bryans songs and the meaning and depth of his words. Being a personal fan of Zach Bryans music I was very interested in your article and found the way you chose to word his songs very interesting and attention grabbing. The inclusion of both his happy songs, sad songs and songs in-between really shows the depth to Zach Bryan as an artist as well as a person. Your use of vivid verbs was very well done and it adds to the writing very well.
This deep dive into the album shows the overall passion you have for music. The way the album is laid out with different emotions as if its telling a story is interesting. Some of the vivid words you chose such as evoke or resonate make the emotions that follow more powerful.
Although we both did different blog topics, I like how we both ended up analyzing songs and the lyrical meanings behind them (a pure coincidence I assure you). I’ve never heard of this song before but the meaning really resonated with me and the description of the artist’s voice really got me. I absolutely love your description. While you have many vivid verbs, my favorite is “pull at heartstrings” in the third paragraph.