SEATTLE — Zach Bryan's music had been bubbling online for a few years. The country-adjacent singer-songwriter was serving as a Navy ordnanceman stationed in Washington state while his passionate following grew, sort of by accident. After workdays spent arming and disarming bombs or training for his next deployment, the Johnny Cash-loving kid from Oklahoma began posting cellphone-shot performance videos on social media and eventually self-released two albums of intimate, heavy-hearted acoustic songs, including his viral breakout "Heading South."
Everything changed in 2021 when Bryan, who lived on Whidbey Island for a time, was given an honorable discharge "to go play some music," he announced that year. No longer a World Wide Web away, Bryan's online admirers became throngs of IRL ticket-buyers as he hit the road on a robust itinerary that eventually led back to Washington last fall, the place where Bryan wrote many of his songs.
Although Bryan doesn't consider himself a country singer — his folky, twang-rocking tunes sang in an Okie's drawl are more in the Jason Isbell vein — country audiences grabbed hold like a bronc rider to a bucking steer, even as Bryan has distanced himself from Nashville's mainstream. Initially recorded in Woodinville with producer Ryan Hadlock, Bryan's emotional sledgehammer "Something in the Orange" became the unlikely country-ish smash of the year, earning Bryan a Grammy nomination for best country solo performance.
