Songs of Male Sadness
Zach Bryan releases another mammoth document of masculine vulnerability, while Sturgill Simpson gets cosmic with a new alter-ego.
Zach Bryan - The Great American Bar Scene
There is one major problem with the music of Zach Bryan, the Oklahoma native and Navy veteran turned arena-filling superstar: There is just too damn much of it.
Bryan broke through in 2022 with an unwieldy, frequently brilliant album called American Heartbreak, its 34 songs spanning a two-hour run time. That album was book-ended with a pair of EPs, each released within the same calendar year, and followed a year later with the 16-song Zach Bryan. His latest, The Great American Bar Scene, features 19 songs and lasts more than an hour. This is an astonishing and frankly exhausting level of prolificacy, particularly for an artist who is also constantly on tour.
It may also sound rather familiar— after all, Bryan is essentially emulating the more-is-more release strategy favored by Taylor Swift, another artist who has a preternatural work ethic and a pathological opposition to leaving any song languishing in the vault for long. Like Swift, Bryan must be credited for the savvy way he has gamed the streaming algorithms and built a captive audience through sheer market saturation. Also like Swift, his voluminous approach has robbed the music of some of its emotional impact, the too-muchness of it all diluting the strength of individual songs or albums.
Still another sense in which Bryan and Swift are connected: Both write songs that feels diaristic in their vulnerability, providing the sense— whether real or imagined— that they are exposing their most unvarnished aches and desires. Bryan, in particular, has emerged as one of our poet laureates of male tears, his burgeoning body of work consumed with the loss of his mother, the dissolution of romantic relationships, and masculine sensitivity in general.
This is mostly still true on The Great American Bar Scene, an album that largely follows the template of previous Bryan releases, taking just a few measured steps toward sonic and thematic expansion. As with Zach Bryan, the new album opens with a spoken-word poem (“Lucky Enough”) featuring Bryan at his most reflective and philosophical: “If I’m lucky enough I’ll understand losing someone close/ I’ll clench my teeth on New Year’s Eve and try to talk to ghosts.” The rest of the album unfolds at a leisurely pace, full of loose and lived-in performances from Bryan and his road band, captured in warm, intimate recordings.
Bryan has already experienced enough loss for a lifetime, and throughout The Great American Bar Scene he wears the weight of his years— all 28 of them— as though he’s a much older man. The wearying effects of time come up over and over— not just on “28,” a decidedly less jubilant mile-marker than Swift’s “22,” but also in “Sandpaper,” about the two-sided coin of vulnerability and grit: “And they’ve been trying to smooth me out/ For twenty-seven seasons now.”
Not every song is positioned as a memoir. In fact, some of the standout moments are the ones where Bryan writes in character— as in “Oak Island,” a sinister slice of crime fiction that’s immediately one of his catalog highlights. In “Mechanical Bull,” led by wiry acoustic guitar work, Bryan traces the journey of a lovelorn itinerant, which may or may not be him. Once more, the song’s action is propelled by the relentless march of time: “Took a few years to get here, brother.”
Another point of distinction is the increased presence of heartland rock in Bryan’s musical milieu, leading to a few more raucous, upbeat numbers than on the ballad-heavy Zach Bryan. The best of these is “American Night,” a rip-roaring barroom rocker with puffing harmonica and ragged guitar licks. Even when he lets loose, though, Bryan is never truly unburdened; one of the album’s best songs is “Pink Skies,” which has almost enough bounce and twang to make you forget its funereal setting.
As with the previous album, there are some high-wattage guest stars— and if nobody makes as strong an impression as Kacey Musgraves did on the last one, Bruce Springsteen comes pretty close, adding an extra layer of gravitas to “Sandpaper.” Walk-ons from John Mayer and John Moreland are forgettable, outclassed by a spirited Noeline Hofmann duet on the flatlands-feting “Purple Gas.”
There are more than enough standouts here to qualify The Great American Bar Scene as another very good Zach Bryan album— even as it returns to the same musical and thematic wells of his previous releases. Bryan has now mapped out this emotional terrain with both thoroughness and detail— the question is, can he find his way to somewhere new?
My rating: 7 out of 10.
Johnny Blue Skies - Passage Du Desir
“They don’t ask you what your name is when you get up to Heaven/ And thank God— I couldn’t tell her if I had to who I am.” Identity can be a simple question with a thorny answer, especially when its posed by an ineffable deity— or when it comes midway through an album that’s credited to Johnny Blue Skies, but sounds for all the world like classic Sturgill Simpson.
It’s a question that looms large across Passage Du Desir, which is in fact the work of Simpson working under a cryptic alter-ego. On one level, the creation of Johnny Blue Skies is simply a loophole, a way for the Kentuckian to wiggle out of a self-imposed restriction. For years he has claimed that there would be just five original Sturgill Simpson records— a promise he’s kept so long as you count his two-part Cuttin’ Grass sessions as a single entity, and go along with the ruse that Johnny Blue Skies is someone else entirely.
What complicates this narrative is that, on Passage Du Desir, Sturgill reconnects with the strengths that made his first few albums so striking— or, as Stephen M. Deusner writes in Pitchfork, Simpson “sounds more like himself than he has in ages.”
You can hear it in the music itself, where Sturgill is at the top of his game as a conjurer of country music’s cosmic side. The album unfolds at a leisurely tempo, based around percolating percussion and plenty of twang, yet there’s also space for classic rock guitar licks and swirling psychedelia. “Jupiter’s Faerie,” one of the album’s highlights, plays like a druggy version of the old countrypolitan sound, a grand and string-laden ballad that just weirder as it goes. In “If the Sun Never Rises Again,” Simpson created a sultry groove, once again demonstrating his command of simmering country-soul.
From the start of his career, Simpson has been heralded as an heir to the outlaw country tradition— a connection that’s almost unavoidable, given his deep Waylon Jennings rumble. His previous album, 2021’s terrific The Ballad of Dood & Juanita, took his love of the outlaw tradition to its logical extreme, crafting a murder narrative loosely riffing on Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. The outlaw posture in Passage Du Desir is less pronounced, but only marginally so. In “Who I Am,” he fires a few shots at the outlaw’s ultimate antagonist— country radio— reintroducing himself to us as a modern-day outsider. In “Mint Tea,” he leverages his renegade bona fides for a moment of tenderness: “So put another band-aid on my bullet wound/ Pour us both another cup of that mint tea.”
Throughout the album, Simpson filters his ruminations on identity through myth-making and lore— yet Johnny Blue Skies also allows for some moments of striking autobiography. In the moody opener “Swamp of Sadness,” the former Naval officer sings about “a drunken sailor lost and lonely,” while “Scooter Blues” is grounded in the mundane details of domesticity: “Spend my mornings making chocolate milk and Eggos/ My days at the beach, my nights stepping on Legos.” In the midst of an extended identity crisis, these songs feel like moments of groundedness and clarity— and no matter what he’s calling himself, Simpson has made one of the richest albums in his catalog.
My rating: 8 out of 10.
Silverada - Silverada
Speaking of alter-egos, the long-running Austin band Mike and the Moonpies is back with a new album— and a new name. Nearly two decades after their inception, the country-rock stalwarts have decided to put away childish things, trading the goofy charm of their original moniker for the Western mystique of Silverada. In no way is this an upgrade— Mike and the Moonpies was endearing, while Silverada just sounds like the name of a pickup truck.
And yet, the first album released under their new name is so sleek and so purposeful, it almost justifies the change in identity— simply put, Silverada is the sound of a band reborn. It’s a fiery and focused set of originals that combine country twang, indie rock attitude, combustible full-band performances, and textured songwriting from lead singer Mike Harmeier.
In fact, part of what makes Silverada so bracing is its deft incorporation of autobiography. Some of the best Mike and the Moonpies albums have essentially been genre exercises— best of all the weepy, string-laden Cheap Silver and Solid Country Gold, a sadsack instant-classic. Here, Harmeier and Co sound like they are stripping away conceptual framings to present something more earnest and interior. That much is evident from the opener “Radio Wave,” which shifts from knowing self-deprecation (“I hate the way I play the blues”) to pointed aesthetic statements (“Americana is a myth, I told ya”).
The album isn’t just a triumph for Harmeier, but for the whole band, featuring some of their best and most expansive playing. The powder-keg “Eagle Rare” rides a simmering groove, while “Stubborn Son” presents some of their finest back-porch storytelling. “Stay By My Wide” is a crawling slow blues number, and best of all is “Something I’m Working On,” a raucous country-rock rave-up featuring a duet with Brent Cobb. There’s a level of craft here that speaks to the years and the mileage this band has absorbed— and even with their new name, they sound more sure-footed than ever.
My rating: 7 out of 10.
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