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      The Sudden Rise of Zach Bryan

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherOne of the year’s biggest pop breakouts is Zach Bryan, a Navy veteran who makes calm and detailed country-folk. His major label debut album, “American Heartbreak,” has steadily held in the Top 20 of the Billboard album chart since its release in May.Bryan is not a radio fixture, and mostly has found success on streaming, translating into live crowds of several thousand per night. He is also a reluctant star, offering very little to the public outside of his music and Twitter feed.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Bryan’s old-fashioned artistry and 1990s attitude, the shifts in mainstream country music that have in part set the table for his rise and how genre boundaries serve as guideposts, even for artists who assiduously try to skirt them.Guest:Grady Smith, who hosts a YouTube channel about country musicConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’: Bringing Loretta Lynn’s Story to Life

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      The 1976 book (and its 1980 film adaptation) helped the world see the country star’s remarkable resilience. The writer who worked by her side remembers his one-of-a-kind collaborator.When I was helping Loretta Lynn with her book, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” I hung around backstage while she performed. Sometimes she would call me out onstage and introduce me — “Here’s George, he’s my writer.” (In her Appalachian twang, it came out “rah-ter.”)I like to profess that I was not so much her writer as her stenographer. She would chatter away, whatever was on her mind, and usually it was pertinent, part of the emerging autobiography. She was a songwriter, who saw life in snappy couplets, most of them taken from her head-of-the-holler upbringing and later her tumultuous marriage with Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr. (His nickname, Mooney, came from his past delivering moonshine, and maybe sipping some of the product.)I had never written a book with somebody else, but I used my reporting and writing skills, with considerable help from Loretta’s memory and storytelling talents in the verbal Appalachian tradition. We’d do most of the talking in her motel, when she summoned me sometime before noon, and she usually had her own agenda. Tucked into the motel bed, sometimes she would be focused on something that had gone right or wrong in the show the night before, or family matters. But she was usually businesslike, respectful of the visitor.One day she wanted to talk about her late father, Melvin (Ted) Webb, who loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt for helping Appalachian people in the Depression. “Daddy thought he hung the moon,” she said. Then she would say, “George, you write a few things about FDR.” Yes, ma’am.She accepted me into her world. She knew I was a New York Times national correspondent based in Louisville, Ky., covering Appalachia. I wore jeans, had a beard and hair near my shoulders, and loved the ham and biscuits her fans sent into the bus. I had been introduced to country music in summers way upstate New York, where you could get the radio station WWVA — Hank Williams or Kitty Wells — clear as a bell from West Virginia.The writer’s wife, Marianne Vecsey, pushed for the book’s cover to feature a photo of Lynn in a high-neck Victorian dress.J.P. Roth CollectionBut I first heard Loretta in 1967, in the good old days when New York City had a country station. One day it played “Sweet Thang,” her duet with Ernest Tubb. It was written by Nat Stuckey, but pretty much told the story of Loretta and Mooney’s life.The man sings how he “slipped out of the house about sundown,” and his wife traces him down to the bar, “yellin’ loud enough to wake the dead.” Then Loretta sings, in an ominous feline yowl: “Well … has anybody here seen Sweet Thang?” The heart and soul of country music — cheatin’ songs. Or, at least his and hers. Even coming from the radio or the jukebox, her voice cut through the ozone, every inflection proclaiming, “This lady is different.”Now, in 1970 I was moving to Loretta Lynn’s home state of Kentucky. I started at the Times as a sportswriter but leaped at the offer from great Times editors Gene Roberts and Dave Jones to go cover Appalachia, I had read the book “Night Comes to the Cumberlands” by the activist lawyer Harry Caudill of Whitesburg, Ky., not far from Loretta’s Van Lear, and I wanted to follow up on Caudill’s visions.On Dec. 30, 1970, I happened to be an hour away from the horrible coal-mine explosion in Hyden. A few months later, I learned that Loretta Lynn had taken her band off the road to play a concert in Louisville for the benefit of the Hyden survivors.In the fall of 1972, I arranged an interview with Loretta in Nashville the morning after she became the first woman to win entertainer of the year at the Country Music Awards. By now country music was fused into my internal mission — telling the story of the mountains, the people, the language, the beliefs. I wanted to do right for Appalachia.The first interview was like all the ones that followed, except that she was exhausted from the awards ceremony and getting up early to be on a morning TV show. But she had time for me, a stranger. Her manager David Skepner often said, “Loretta never met a stranger,” which I would see over and over again.Loretta escorted me into her world — “mah rah-ter, George” — and I began to feel at home.I became friendly with Skepner, a Beverly Hills guy, now living in Nashville, who doubled as her bodyguard. As a city boy, I had to get used to him depositing his big iron on the windowsill when we were sitting in Loretta’s room. (“David, could you put your ball cap over the pistol, and point it toward the window?” I would ask.)I became friendly with the fans, so many of them women — particularly the Johnson sisters from Colorado, a three-person fan club — Loudilla was the leader; Kay was the heart; and Loretta Johnson was the gall.One time at a picnic, Loretta Johnson was dishing out pie, pecan, I think it was, and when I said please, she slopped it into the palm of my hand. Laughs all around. For many years, Loretta Lynn would bring up the look on my face as I lapped up the bits of pecan pie. My initiation. Welcome to the country.Mooney Lynn was my linchpin, caring for their twins at the ranch but sometimes back on the road. I liked him immensely, but then again, I wasn’t married to him. One day, sitting around their motel room, I asked Mooney and Loretta about his image, the source for the songs Loretta wrote and sang.I can still picture Mooney saying, “Hell’s bells, if it’s true, write it.”That day, the book got even better.(They never told me that Loretta had lopped three years off her age when she started performing. She said she had been 13 when she got married, when in fact she had been 16. It came out long after the book and the paperback and the movie. I never got to ask why they made her sound so young.)One other thing about the book: my wife, Marianne Vecsey, an artist, had seen a glamour photo of Loretta in a long, high-neck, frilly, white Victorian dress, and she told Bernard Geis, the publisher, that any woman would want to look at that photo. The editors, being guys, dawdled a bit, but eventually put the color photo on the front cover.When the book came out, the editors heard reports that ladies who lunch — on Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue or Michigan Ave. — were picking up the book, and buying it, and buying it.Loretta and Mooney trusted me to get it right. I was her “rah-ter,” but the pretty lady in the frilly dress had put herself into the project the way she wrote songs. It’s her book. More

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      Loretta Lynn, Country Music Star and Symbol of Rural Resilience, Dies at 90

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      Her powerful voice, playful lyrics and topical songs were a model for generations of country singers and songwriters. So was her life story.NASHVILLE — Loretta Lynn, the country singer whose plucky songs and inspiring life story made her one of the most beloved American musical performers of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. She was 90.Her family said in a statement that she died in her sleep at her ranch, which had turned Hurricane Mills, about 70 miles west of Nashville, into a tourist destination.Ms. Lynn built her stardom not only on her music, but also on her image as a symbol of rural pride and determination. Her story was carved out of Kentucky coal country, from hardscrabble beginnings in Butcher Hollow (which her songs made famous as Butcher Holler).She became a wife at 15, a mother at 16 and a grandmother in her early 30s, married to a womanizing sometime bootlegger who managed her to stardom. That story made her autobiography, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” a best seller and the grist for an Oscar-winning movie adaptation of the same name.Her voice was unmistakable, with its Kentucky drawl, its tensely coiled vibrato and its deep reserves of power. “She’s louder than most, and she’s gonna sing higher than you think she will,” said John Carter Cash, who produced Ms. Lynn’s final recordings. “With Loretta you just turn on the mic, stand back and hold on.”Ms. Lynn performing at the Grand Ole Opry in the 1960s. She got her start in the music business at a time when male artists dominated the country airwaves. Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesHer songwriting made her a model for generations of country songwriters. Her music was rooted in the verities of honky-tonk country and the Appalachian songs she had grown up singing, and her lyrics were lean and direct, with nuggets of wordplay: “She’s got everything it takes/To take everything you’ve got,” she sang in “Everything It Takes,” one of her many songs about cheating, released in 2016.Ms. Lynn got her start in the music business at a time when male artists dominated the country airwaves. She nevertheless became a voice for ordinary women, recording three-minute morality plays in the 1960s and ’70s — many written by her, some written by others — that spoke to the changing mores of women throughout America.In “Hey Loretta,” a wry 1973 hit about walking out on rural drudgery written by the cartoonist Shel Silverstein, she sang, “You can feed the chickens and you can milk the cow/This woman’s liberation, honey, is gonna start right now.” Silverstein also wrote the beleaguered housewife’s lament “One’s on the Way,” a No. 1 country hit for Ms. Lynn in 1971.“Loretta always just said exactly what she was going through right then in her music, and that’s why it resonates with us,” the country singer Miranda Lambert, one of countless younger performers influenced by Ms. Lynn, said in a 2016 PBS “American Masters” documentary, “Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl.”Jack White, the singer and guitarist of the White Stripes, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004, the year he produced Ms. Lynn’s Grammy-winning album “Van Lear Rose,” that she “was breaking down barriers for women at the right time.” Her songs, Mr. White said, had a message: “This is how women live. This is what women are thinking.” And Ms. Lynn, he added, was taking these strides “in the country realm, where a lot of women weren’t able to do what they wanted.”Ms. Lynn in 1972 with her husband, Oliver V. Lynn Jr., who was also known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney. They had a long but tempestuous marriage. Gary Settle/The New York TimesShe drew much of her material from her marriage to Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr., who was also known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney, the last of these nicknames a nod to his practice of selling bootleg whiskey.Ms. Lynn’s 1966 hit “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man)” was based on a confrontation she had with one of her husband’s mistresses; her 1968 single “Fist City” was born of a similar incident. The inspiration for “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” in 1966, were those times when Mr. Lynn, his libido roused after a night out, would stumble home expecting to satisfy it.“Doo would always try to figure out which line was for him, and 90 percent of the time every line in there was for him,” Ms. Lynn told the weekly Nashville Scene in 2000. “Those songs was true to life. We fought hard, and we loved hard.” The marriage lasted 48 years, until Mr. Lynn died of congestive heart failure in 1996.His drinking and womanizing notwithstanding, Mr. Lynn was one of his wife’s greatest sources of musical encouragement, certainly early in their marriage, after they moved from Kentucky to Custer, Wash., in the late 1940s. Impressed by how well she sang while doing chores at home, he bought her a guitar and a copy of Country Song Roundup, a popular magazine that included the words and chords to the latest jukebox hits.‘I Fought Back’Mr. Lynn went on to manage his wife’s career, insisting that she perform in honky-tonks and at radio stations even before she was convinced of her musical gifts. Ms. Lynn’s dependence on her husband made him as much a father figure as a spouse to her, even though he was less than six years her senior. He used the term “spanking” to describe the times he hit her. It was not until the couple moved to Nashville in the early 1960s, and Ms. Lynn befriended Patsy Cline there, that she began to stand up to her husband.“After I met Patsy, life got better for me because I fought back,” Ms. Lynn told Nashville Scene. “Before that, I just took it. I had to. I was 3,000 miles away from my mom and dad and had four little kids. There wasn’t nothin’ I could do about it. But later on, I started speakin’ my mind when things weren’t right.”Ms. Lynn’s growing assertiveness coincided with the first stirrings of the modern women’s movement. She rejected the feminist tag in interviews, but many of her songs, including the 1978 hit “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” were fiery expressions of female resolve. In that song she sang:Well, I don’t want a wall to paint, but I’m a-gonna have my say.From now on, lover-boy, it’s 50-50, all the way.Up to now I’ve been an object made for pleasin’ you.Times have changed and I’m demanding satisfaction too.Ms. Lynn’s sexual politics had already taken an emphatic turn with “The Pill” (1975), a riotous celebration of reproductive freedom written by Lorene Allen, Don McHan and T.D. Bayless. Outspoken records like that and “Rated X,” about the double standards facing divorced women, might not have been as popular with country music’s conservative-leaning audience had they not been tempered by Ms. Lynn’s playful way with a lyric. In “Rated X,” a No. 1 country hit in 1972, she wrote, “The women all look at you like you’re bad, and the men all hope you are.”Loretta Lynn in 1976, the year her memoir, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” was published. It became the basis of an Oscar-winning movie. Waring Abbott“I wrote about my heartaches, I wrote about everything,” she said in a 2016 interview with The Times. “But when you get to hear the song, you just grin.”Her most confrontational recordings of the ’70s, in fact, corresponded with her greatest popularity. In 1972, she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association. The next year, her picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek. She became a frequent guest on late-night talk shows and the spokeswoman for Crisco shortening. With the title of her 1971 hit “You’re Lookin’ at Country” as her calling card, Ms. Lynn, in her down-home dresses, came to embody rural resilience and self-respect.Loretta Webb was born in a cabin in Butcher Hollow on April 14, 1932, the second of eight children. Her parents, Melvin Theodore Webb and Clara Marie (Ramey) Webb, liked to decorate the cabin walls with magazine photos of movie stars. Loretta was named after Loretta Young.In “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1976), her memoir written with George Vecsey of The Times, Ms. Lynn noted that her mother, a woman of Cherokee and Scots-Irish descent, had taught her to sing antediluvian ballads and instructed her in rural storytelling. Ms. Lynn and her brothers and sisters often sang in church and at other social gatherings. Three of her siblings also pursued careers in music, notably Brenda Gail, who under the name Crystal Gayle became a star in her own right in the late 1970s with crossover hits like “Talking in Your Sleep” and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”Ms. Lynn quit singing in public when she married in 1948. Wanting to get away from Appalachia, she and her husband moved to Washington the next year, when Ms. Lynn, at 16, gave birth to Betty Sue, the first of the couple’s six children. Ms. Lynn in 1972, the year she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association. Gary Settle/The New York TimesIt was a decade before Ms. Lynn performed again. Not long after she did, though, she appeared on a Tacoma, Wash., television talent show hosted by Buck Owens, and attracted the attention of Norm Burley, an executive with Zero Records, a small label based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She signed with the company and recorded four original songs for it in 1960.Success in NashvilleOn the strength of the airplay received by the single “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” the Lynns moved to Nashville, where Ms. Lynn began recording demos for the Wilburn Brothers, a popular country singing duo who became her music publishers, and helped her obtain a deal with Decca Records. She made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry in September 1960. In 1962, “Success,” about the relationship between material wealth and happiness, became her first Top 10 single.Over the next 28 years, Ms. Lynn placed 77 singles on the country charts. More than 50 of them reached the Top 10, and 16 reached No. 1, including “After the Fire Is Gone,” the first in a series of steamy hit duets she made with Conway Twitty. Virtually all of her recordings were steeped in traditional country arrangements suited to Ms. Lynn’s perky backwoods drawl; most were produced by Owen Bradley, who likened her to “a female Hank Williams.”Ms. Lynn performing at the Bonnaroo Music and Art Festival in Tennessee in 2011.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMs. Lynn wrote fewer songs as the 1970s progressed but continued to tour and record. She also established her own booking agency, music publishing company and clothing line, as well as the tourist attraction Loretta Lynn’s Ranch, a 19th-century plantation house that she and her husband bought in the late 1960s. The Hurricane Mills complex includes campgrounds, a dude ranch, a motocross course, a music shed, a replica of the cabin where Ms. Lynn grew up, a simulated coal mine and museums.The Academy of Country Music named Ms. Lynn its artist of the decade for the 1970s just as “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the 1980 movie based on her autobiography, returned her Cinderella story to the forefront of the national consciousness. The film starred Sissy Spacek, who won an Academy Award, in the title role, and Tommy Lee Jones as Doolittle Lynn.Ms. Lynn was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988. Her second autobiography, “Still Woman Enough” (2002), picked up where “Coal Miner’s Daughter” had left off. She was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors the next year and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York in 2008. She received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2010. Three years later, President Barack Obama named Ms. Lynn a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.The strength of her influence in the music world was witnessed by “Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn,” a 2010 album featuring Kid Rock, Carrie Underwood, Lucinda Williams, the White Stripes and others. “Van Lear Rose” won two Grammy Awards and was ranked among the best albums of 2004, both in country music publications and in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone that cater to rock audiences.In 2007, Ms. Lynn quietly began a long-term recording project with the producer Mr. Carter Cash, Johnny Cash’s son, in the studio that had been Johnny Cash’s cabin outside Nashville. Working in the style of her ’60s and ’70s recordings, with seasoned Nashville musicians playing vintage instruments, she recorded more than 90 tracks: remakes of her past hits, Christmas and gospel songs, Appalachian songs from her childhood and a handful of new songs. The first album from those sessions, “Full Circle,” appeared in 2016, followed later that year by a Christmas album; “Wouldn’t It Be Great” was released in 2018 and “Still Woman Enough” in 2021.At her Tennessee plantation home in 2015.Kyle Dean reinford for The New York TimesIn 2020, Ms. Lynn published “Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust,” a book recalling her friendship with Patsy Cline.Survivors include a younger sister, the country singer Crystal Gayle; her daughters Patsy Lynn Russell, Peggy Lynn, Clara (Cissie) Marie Lynn; and her son Ernest; as well as 17 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Betty Sue Lynn, and another son, Jack, died before her.She also leaves legions of admirers, women as well as men, who draw strength and encouragement from her irrepressible, down-to-earth music and spirit.“I’m proud I’ve got my own ideas, but I ain’t no better than nobody else,” she was quoted as saying in “Finding Her Voice” (1993), Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s comprehensive history of women in country music. “I’ve often wondered why I became so popular, and maybe that’s the reason. I think I reach people because I’m with ’em, not apart from ’em.” More

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      Ray Edenton, ‘A-Team’ Studio Guitarist in Nashville, Dies at 95

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      In a career that spanned four decades, he played on thousands of sessions and accompanied many of the biggest names in country music.NASHVILLE — Ray Edenton, a versatile session guitarist who played on thousands of recordings by artists like the Everly Brothers, Charley Pride, Neil Young and Patsy Cline, died on Sept. 21 at the home of his son, Ray Q. Edenton, in Goodlettsville, Tenn. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Ronda Hardcastle.A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio professionals, Mr. Edenton contributed discreet, empathetic rhythm guitar to myriad hits in a career that spanned four decades. His name was less known than his musicianship, but generations of listeners knew the records he helped make famous, a body of work estimated to exceed 10,000 sessions.Ms. Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,” Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass,” Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” and Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough” were among the blockbuster country singles, many of them also pop crossover successes, that featured his guitar work.“I did 22 sessions in five days one week,” Mr. Edenton, who retired in 1991 at age 65, said in looking back on his years as a studio musician during an interview at an event held in his honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2007.“That’s four a day for three days and five a day for two days,” he went on. “You don’t go home on five-a-days, you sleep on the couch in the studio.”On the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love,” both of which reached the pop, country and R&B Top 10 in 1957, Mr. Edenton played driving, syncopated acoustic guitar riffs alongside Don Everly.“I lived for quite a few years off those licks I stole from Don,” he said at the 2007 event.It was in fact the two men matching each other note for note that gave those big-beat Everly classics their distinctive stamp.Although primarily a rhythm guitarist, Mr. Edenton was occasionally featured on lead guitar, notably on Marty Robbins’s 1956 recording “Singing the Blues,” which was galvanized by his careening electric guitar solo. His lead work on 12-string acoustic guitar was heard on George Hamilton IV’s 1963 hit “Abilene” — a record that, like “Singing the Blues,” topped the country chart and also reached the pop Top 20.Mr. Edenton was also a songwriter. His chief credit was “You’re Running Wild,” a Top 10 country single for the Louvin Brothers, written with his brother-in-law at the time, Don Winters, in 1956. (He also played rhythm guitar on the recording.)Mr. Edenton in the studio with the singer Charlie Louvin. He co-wrote “You’re Running Wild,” a Top 10 country single for Mr. Louvin and his brother Ira, in 1956.Hubert Long Collection, Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumMr. Edenton’s work as a session musician reached beyond country music, with singers like Julie Andrews, Rosemary Clooney, Sammy Davis Jr. as well as rock acts like Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and the Sir Douglas Quintet. He played on Mr. Young’s acclaimed 1978 album, “Comes a Time.”He also took part in the Nashville sessions that produced the album “Tennessee Firebird,” a pioneering fusion of country and jazz released by the vibraphonist Gary Burton in 1967.“Everybody in the world came here, and we recorded with all of them,” Mr. Edenton said of Nashville’s studios in his Country Music Hall of Fame interview. “You might do a pop session in the morning and bluegrass in the afternoon and rock ’n’ roll at night.”In 2007, Mr. Edenton, who played mandolin, ukulele and banjo as well as guitar, was inducted with the rest of the A-Team into the Musicians Hall of Fame.Ray Quarles Edenton was born on Nov. 3, 1926, in Mineral, Va., a gold-mining town about 50 miles northwest of Richmond. He was the youngest of four children of Tom Edenton, a sawmill operator, and Laura (Quarles) Edenton, a homemaker.Young Ray taught himself to play ukulele and guitar at an early age and later provided music for square dances with his two older brothers, who played fiddle and guitar.In 1946, after serving in the Army, he joined a band called the Rodeo Rangers, which performed at dances and on the radio in Maryland and Virginia. Two years later he became the bassist for the Korn Krackers, an ensemble led by the guitarist Joe Maphis that appeared on the Richmond radio show “Old Dominion Barn Dance.” He began working at WNOX in Knoxville in 1949 before being treated for tuberculosis in a Veterans Administration hospital, where he spent 28 months.Mr. Edenton with the singer Jeanne Pruett and others. “Everybody in the world came here, and we recorded with all of them,” Mr. Edenton said. “You might do a pop session in the morning, and bluegrass in the afternoon, and rock ’n’ roll at night.”Hubert Long Collection, Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumMr. Edenton moved to Nashville in 1952 and became a guitarist at the Grand Ole Opry while also working in the touring bands of, among other luminaries, Hank Williams and Ray Price. A notable early recording session was “One by One,” a honky-tonk weeper that was a No. 1 country hit for Red Foley and Kitty Wells in 1954.Most country acts of the era did not feature drummers in their lineups. Mr. Edenton’s nimble, unobtrusive guitar playing, inspired by the cadences of a snare drum, created a steady demand for his services among record companies, especially when he was tapped to fill the vacancy created on the A-Team when the guitarist Hank Garland suffered disabling injuries in a car accident in 1961.Besides his daughter and his son, Mr. Edenton is survived by his wife of almost 50 years, Polly Roper Edenton. His marriage to Rita Winters, a country singer who performed under the name Rita Robbins, ended in divorce.“People often ask me about session musicians and why, back in those days, only a few people made all the records,” Mr. Edenton said in 2007, reflecting on his heyday with Nashville’s A-Team.“It was several things. You had to learn real quick. You had to adapt real quick. And if you couldn’t do that, you couldn’t do sessions.” More

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      Zach Bryan Is Music’s Most Reluctant New Star

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      The Navy veteran — who blends folk, rock and country — has had a breakthrough year with his major-label debut, “American Heartbreak.” But fame isn’t what he’s after.INDIANAPOLIS — In late May, Zach Bryan released “American Heartbreak,” a bracing and shaggily elegant 34-song country-folk opus that served as his major-label debut. It opened at No. 5 on the Billboard album chart, an astonishing mark for a singer who less than a year before had been in the Navy, putting out music on the side.A couple of weeks later, he was riding his motorcycle with his girlfriend when he took his eyes off the road for a moment and crashed. The left side of his forehead was badly scraped, his right arm deeply gashed and his skin pockmarked with road rash. (His girlfriend, Deb Peifer, was largely unhurt.)The two had just spent a quiet afternoon at a nearby creek. The emotional whiplash jolted Bryan, 26, into his new reality.“The most beautiful moment that I’ve had in the last five years, and the worst moment I’ve had in the last five years, and it all happened in like 24 hours,” he said in July, in the diviest dive bar in Indianapolis, the afternoon after he performed to around 6,000 people at TCU Amphitheater at White River State Park.“I’m like a Kerouac guy,” he continued. “Like, I think life is reckless and it should be insane. It all ends in agony. It’s all about the outcome, so like, do it, you know? Do whatever it is.”But the accident — and the new responsibilities it underscored — chastened him. “I rode motorcycles 120 miles an hour, 130 miles an hour in my life. Now I’m on a scooter going 10 miles an hour, like, freaking out, looking back at her like, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’”A handful of days after the crash, he returned to the stage. And not long after that, as Bryan is wont to do, he started writing through the suffering, resulting in an EP, “Summertime Blues.” “Here,” Bryan said, his eyes tightening ever so slightly. “Thanks for the pain.”BRYAN HAS BEEN making hay from pain for the past few years, first getting attention for the muscularly intense songs he released on Twitter and YouTube while he was still in the Navy, and now as one of this year’s most sudden breakout stars. “American Heartbreak” has hovered in the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 since its release, displaying staying power similar to recent albums from Kendrick Lamar, Future and Post Malone.It is a refreshingly unpretentious album, with songs that take the shortest path from feeling to words while also deploying some alarmingly lovely turns of phrase. “When you place your head between my collar and jaw/I don’t know much, but there’s no weight at all,” he rasps on “Something in the Orange,” which has become his most recognizable hit since his early songs “God Speed” and “Heading South.” On “Sun to Me,” he vividly captures feeling unworthy of someone’s love:I don’t recall what you were wearing on the first night we metBesides the subtle cloud around you from my last cigaretteAnd you come from a good place with a happy familyThe only bad you’ve ever done was to see the good in meBryan is midsize, sturdy and preternaturally calm. He generally dresses comfortably — Carhartt T-shirt, a well-loved pair of Birkenstock Bostons. But onstage, singing any of a couple dozen songs about wounds and what it takes to lick them, he clenches tight, as if determined to lift an unusually heavy barbell, and nailing it.He grew up a Navy brat — his father was a master chief, and the family was stationed in Japan. When Bryan was in the eighth grade, the family moved to Oologah, Okla., an actual one-stoplight town around 30 miles northeast of Tulsa. His parents, Dewayne and Annette, divorced when he was around 12.Bryan, photographed in early September, his forehead still healing from his motorcycle crash.Kristin Braga Wright for The New York TimesBryan was popular in school, a wrestler who was student council president. He had a rebellious streak, but also a clear idea about the man he intended to become. Graham Bright, a childhood friend who’s now his lead guitar player, recalled a night of drinking when the young men saw police lights nearby. “He goes and hides under a bed and starts crying and he’s just like, ‘I want to join the Navy. That’s all I want to do. And I’m not going to be able to!’”Bryan enlisted when he was 17; the day he shipped off to boot camp, he hadn’t spoken with his father in weeks. “He called my wife some names and he put me on my butt,” Dewayne recalled, referring to his second wife, Anna, with whom Zach now has a strong relationship. “He’s tougher than nails.”Even though he lived with his father, who had full custody, Bryan felt close to his mother, who had also served in the Navy: “an Oklahoma sweetheart, homecoming queen cheerleader, like a small-town freaking famous person almost.”But Annette struggled with alcohol, straining family relationships. She died in 2016, and afterward Bryan’s songwriting deepened. “I think my mom dying really solidified the darkness in life to me,” he said. “It opened that thing in you that’s like, ‘Hey, be a man now.’”“People say I repress,” he continued. “And I’m like, no, the person that I want to tell all this stuff to is dead. And you don’t deserve me weighing in on my feelings to you.”Bryan’s years in the Navy left him with an emotional resilience and a sense of equanimity, even under fire. Peifer noted that “Sometimes he’s so levelheaded that I’m like, wait, you should be mad or something. Like, we need to react to this!”Bryan’s sister, MacKenzie Taylor, said they’d “learned from our mom how to put a mask on,” adding, “And he’s a dude in Oklahoma — he’s not supposed to have emotions.”In the military, Bryan was an aviation ordnanceman stationed in Washington and Florida, and did tours in Bahrain and Djibouti. He assembled, repaired and loaded weapons, and in his downtime, recorded songs. He was a fan of the Oklahoma country band Turnpike Troubadours — especially the songwriting of its frontman, Evan Felker — as well as Radiohead, Bon Iver, Gregory Alan Isakov and assorted “weird indie music.”In 2015, he started posting clips of his music online, and by 2019 he was garnering attention from progressive country music websites. In Florida, some Navy buddies helped him record his first album, “DeAnn” — his mother’s middle name — which he self-released in August of that year. A second set, “Elisabeth,” followed in 2020. By 2021, still in the Navy, he made his first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.Bryan records and releases music at a furious pace. “I have this weird fear of like, if I don’t put this music out, someone 20 years from now isn’t going to be able to hear it,” he said. Kristin Braga Wright for The New York Times“I was like, don’t put your guitar down, keep going, something’s going to happen,” he said. “Not because I felt driven. Not because I wanted to be famous. Not because I wanted to be rich. I literally just would sit there and think about my mom and be like, Something is telling me not to stop doing this.”Bryan was honorably discharged from the Navy in August of last year, and soon after set out on the road, finding a rabid fan base waiting for him.“He wouldn’t sell meet-and-greet tickets because he is too goddamned principled, I guess,” J.R. Carroll, Bryan’s keyboard player and another Oklahoma friend, said with a light cackle. “So they would just have anybody who wanted to meet him after our show. He would just stand there and talk to these people, and they would tell him the most unbelievably dark and depressing stories for three hours.”Now that Bryan is operating at a bigger scale, he is beginning to set boundaries for himself. “People don’t understand the pressure exerting emotion on other people exerts back on you,” Bryan said.‘AMERICAN HEARTBREAK’ HAS 34 songs, an improbable number but not, apparently, an undigestible one. In the four months since its release, Bryan has continued to unleash music at an unconventional clip, more like a rapper than a folk singer.“The EPs I give the label for free — I can’t stop writing,” he said. “I have this weird fear of like, if I don’t put this music out, someone 20 years from now isn’t going to be able to hear it. If some kid needs this in 40 years and he’s 16, he’s sitting in his room, what if I didn’t put out ‘Quiet, Heavy Dreams’? What if that’s his favorite song of all time?”Considering that Bryan is now routinely selling out shows of several thousand people, he’s maintaining raw skepticism about the ruinous power of money and celebrity. He has a decidedly old-fashioned take on the music business and the ways art should be made, a throwback to the authenticity obsessed 1990s, or even the late ’60s and early ’70s.“Songwriting is such a massive part of this,” he said. “If you’re missing out on it, what the hell are you doing? You’re just performing. You’re an actor.”Still, he has embraced the occasional surreal moment — recording “American Heartbreak” at Electric Lady Studios; coincidentally being at the New York restaurant Carbone the night in January that Kanye West went there with Julia Fox; getting the opportunity to work out at the Ohio State football team’s facilities before the Indianapolis concert.“People feel entitled to be famous and rich,” he said, with genuine amazement, “and I’m like, dude, you could be digging ditches, bro.”Besides, the music business is fickle. “You don’t know if it’s cringy in the time,” Bryan said of his songs, and their success. “‘Cause what if it’s a trend? What if all this is going to be embarrassing and you’re just trying to be a genius that you’re not?”In the current slotting of genres, Bryan falls perhaps closest to country, though it doesn’t feel like home to him. “I think people understand that I’m not that,” he said. “I want to be in that Springsteen, Kings of Leon, Ed Sheeran at-the-very-beginning space,” he said.But some of the more partisan elements of the country audience can surface at his shows. In Indianapolis, before Bryan took the stage, parts of the crowd broke out in a vulgar chant about President Biden.Bryan spent much of 2022 on the road. Next year, he plans to scale back to spend more time with family and potentially return to school.Kristin Braga Wright for The New York Times“I told people if I heard it, I would stop it immediately,” Bryan said. “Don’t come to my shows and start it. But they do it anyway.” (He describes himself as a “total libertarian.”)Moments like that contribute to the creeping sense that his success has become too big to fully control and supervise. This was made manifest at a performance in Oklahoma in April, when someone threw a beer at Bryan when he was onstage. The audience was filled with people he knew, or somewhat knew, or somewhat knew him.“You see all these eyes and you’re like, Y’all don’t know me anymore, man. I’ve grown. I’m reborn,” he said last month, taking a cigarette break in a Philadelphia parking lot, not far from the modest home he recently bought. Living in Oklahoma, as much as he loves it, isn’t a viable option right now.And so he’s already retrenching a bit, aiming to make his suddenly big life just a bit more cloistered. “I’m too writing-driven to be a big star,” he said. “I’m not meant for it.”Last month, “he had like a week and a half off,” Peifer said. “Got back, recorded some songs, and then took four days to build cabinets. And it was all of the exact same importance.”And he has been chipping away at the final nine credits he needs to receive his bachelor’s degree, squeezing coursework in between concerts. He’s studying psychology: “I just wanted to figure out why my mom was the way she was, you know? Like the most beautiful lady of all time and also kind of tortured herself.”On Twitter, he recently said he wouldn’t properly tour again: Next year, he plans to play around 30 shows — less than half of this year’s number — so he can leave time to potentially return to school and pursue a master’s degree, ideally in philosophy, and also to spend time with his loved ones.“How are you going to write music that’s personal and heartfelt if you never get to see the people you love?” Carroll asked, adding that the band’s goal is simply “Letting it be beautiful.”That means taking space, and saying no, and knowing when is enough. Bryan underscored the dilemma with what sounds like self-deprecation but is in fact a kind of stoic pragmatism. “Music’s going to die out,” he said, characteristically straight-faced. “You either keep going and you fail, or you stop while you’re ahead.” More

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      Morgan Wallen’s Career Seemed Over. Now He’s Broken a Billboard Record.

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      The country singer was rebuked by the music industry after using a racial slur. Still, “Dangerous: The Double Album” has logged 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s 200 chart.Nineteen months ago, it seemed that the music career of Morgan Wallen — primed as Nashville’s next crossover star — might be dead. Instead, he is now playing to sold-out arenas and has broken chart records set by the likes of Adele and Bruce Springsteen, in a success story that highlights the power of fan loyalty and the challenges of cancel culture.“Dangerous: The Double Album,” Wallen’s second LP, came out at the beginning of 2021 and shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, with big streaming numbers that demonstrated his power among a new generation of country performers. The album was in its third week at the top when TMZ published a video of Wallen using a racial slur. The rebuke was immediate and strong, with Wallen’s songs removed from radio and streaming playlists, and Wallen’s label, Big Loud, saying it would “suspend” his recording contract “indefinitely.”Yet “Dangerous” would hold at No. 1 for a further seven weeks, and since then it has become an unusually enduring hit. The album has now spent 86 weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s chart — dipping to No. 12 only once, when it was pushed out by holiday albums last December — and has been in the Top 5 for 65 of those times.“Dangerous” stands at No. 2 on the latest chart, beaten only by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” another streaming blockbuster that came out in May and has just matched Wallen’s 10-week run at No. 1.Wallen has now beaten the 1964 record set by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary for the longest Top 10 run for an album by a single artist. (In the 66 years of the Billboard 200 album chart, seven other titles have had longer stretches in the Top 10, but those are all movie soundtracks or Broadway cast albums; the longest run of all albums is 173 weeks for the cast album of “My Fair Lady,” which came out in 1956.)In the wake of the controversy last year, Wallen issued multiple apologies, but was otherwise largely unseen in the mainstream media — a rare test of the commercial appeal of an artist without the benefit of supportive TV interviews or magazine covers. But for many in Nashville, he remains a symbol of a pervasive racism that exists just below the surface of the country music business.To hear it from executives at Big Loud, which functions as Wallen’s label, management company and music publisher, the success of “Dangerous” is proof of Wallen’s broad cultural appeal and the quality of his music, which blends beer-soaked bro-countryisms with mellow melodies that at times recall classic rock like Eagles.“We’re having our Garth Brooks moment, our Taylor Swift emergent moment,” Seth England, the chief executive of Big Loud, said in an interview, “of just an artist so big, everyone is getting used to it. Pop is short for popular culture, and he just is popular culture.”When asked how “Dangerous” has managed such extraordinary success, Greg Thompson, the president of Big Loud Management, added simply: “There’s only one explanation. The music is that good.” (Wallen’s suspension from Big Loud, which continued to sell his music, was temporary. Through a representative, Wallen declined to answer questions for this article.)Yet from the beginning, Big Loud — and Republic Records, the division of the giant Universal Music Group that has a deal with Big Loud to promote its artists — has pursued smart strategies to make “Dangerous” a success in the streaming era. Most obvious is the album’s length; taking a page from hip-hop albums that have been exploiting this aspect of the streaming economy for years, “Dangerous” has 30 songs on its standard edition, each of which contributes to the album’s overall numbers each week.Second, Wallen stoked his fans by releasing batches of new songs ahead of the album’s release, sometimes a few at a time, which helped foster the fan loyalty that sustained him in his fallow months of promotion.With Republic’s help, Wallen has also had some success as a pop crossover act, though that process has been slow. Two of his songs, “7 Summers” and “You Proof,” his latest single, have gone as high as No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. According to data from the tracking service Luminate, a little more than half of Wallen’s radio airplay has been on country stations, with pop stations a distant second.In the wake of Wallen’s use of the slur, musicians and journalists debated the role of racism in country music. Wallen gave an interview to “Good Morning America” in which he characterized the incident as a mistake among close friends who “say dumb stuff together.” He added: “In our minds it’s playful. That sounds ignorant, but that’s really where it came from.”Gradually, the Nashville world, and beyond, has largely welcomed him back. In an interview with The New York Times published this month, the country singer Kane Brown, who is Black, said: “I texted him that day. I told him he shouldn’t have said it, but also knowing Morgan, I knew that he didn’t mean it in the way that the world thought that he meant it.” Late last year, Wallen appeared on Lil Durk’s track “Broadway Girls,” a hit on the rapper’s No. 1 album “7220.”Despite the intensity of the criticism levied against Wallen, fans remained loyal. According to Chartmetric, a company that tracks data from streaming and social media, Wallen’s followers on Facebook and Spotify increased at the height of his controversy.Within months, his songs were back in force on the official playlists of major streaming platforms. And according to Luminate, radio stations are now playing Wallen more than at any point since “Dangerous” was released, with his songs being played about 19,000 times a week this summer.Also on this week’s Billboard album chart, the veteran metal band Megadeth opens at No. 3 with its first studio release in six years, “The Sick, the Dying … and the Dead!” DJ Khaled’s “God Did,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 4, and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is in fifth place. More

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      Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson Debut as Plains

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      Both singer-songwriters came of age in the South and started out in indie-rock. Their joint project explores a spectrum of country influences and lets them reckon with their pasts.Jess Williamson and Katie Crutchfield of Plains, a project born in the pandemic during long phone calls between the two musicians.Barrett Emke for The New York TimesThough they first met only five years ago, the musicians Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson have long walked parallel paths.Both grew up in Southern states where country music was omnipresent (Crutchfield, who records as Waxahatchee, in Alabama; Williamson in Texas). Coming of age in the late ’90s, they were shaped by mainstream country radio’s strong but ultimately fleeting embrace of powerhouse female artists: Williamson pored over the lyric booklets to the Chicks records; Crutchfield hummed along to Shania Twain, Martina McBride and Trisha Yearwood songs in the back of her parents’ car.As many teenagers do, they later rebelled by getting into punk and indie-rock. But as they grew older and matured as artists, both found themselves reconnecting with their country roots and trying to make sense of their contradictory feelings about their Southern heritage, finding kindred spirits in elders like the individualistic outlaw songwriters Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams.Crutchfield and Williamson finally crossed paths in 2017 — introduced by Crutchfield’s boyfriend, the musician Kevin Morby, at a restaurant in Austin — and became fast friends. “I just immediately was like, ‘This person is for me,’” Crutchfield said on a video call from an instrument-strewn room in her home in Kansas City, Kan.On the call from Marfa, Texas, in a floral-printed dress and a silver crescent-moon necklace, Williamson remembered another prolonged stretch of bonding time in Los Angeles just before the pandemic: “We’d be at parties and it would just be me and Katie in the corner talking,” she said.In spring 2020, both released piercingly introspective, career-best albums — Waxahatchee’s cleareyed “St. Cloud,” and Williamson’s enchanting “Sorceress” — but were unsure when they’d be able to tour. They shared their frustrations and creative aspirations over long telephone calls during walks in the early months of the pandemic, and one day Crutchfield blurted out, “This is making me want to start a band.” Simple as that, Plains was born.For Williamson, Plains’ debut album “I Walked With You a Ways,” out Oct. 14, was something of an aesthetic continuation of her previous solo release. “‘Sorceress’ was the most I’d ever leaned into country sounds, and I felt like I had unfinished business,” she said, describing the project as a way to “channel these influences that we love,” like Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris’s records as Trio.In spring 2020, both musicians released piercingly introspective albums — Williamson’s enchanting “Sorceress” and Waxahatchee’s cleareyed “St. Cloud.”Barrett Emke for The New York TimesCrutchfield envisioned Plains, though, as something of a palate cleanser after a rewarding but emotionally intense album cycle. “‘St. Cloud’ was a really big record for me in so many ways,” she said. “I got sober right before I made it, and I had to work backwards to recognize myself again and learn how to write songs and make records again.” She said she wasn’t quite ready to make another Waxahatchee record, “but I had all of this energy to do something, so I feel like this project was such a godsend.”A self-described “harmony head,” Crutchfield is no stranger to collaboration: All her life she’s sung and made music with her twin sister Allison, most notably with the precocious, now-defunct pop-punk group P.S. Eliot. Williamson, on the other hand, had mostly worked as a solo artist, so the Plains experience meant opening herself up to new techniques: Crutchfield wanted to achieve a loose, spontaneous feel by tracking their vocals in as few takes as possible, for example.Crutchfield and Williamson each brought songs they’d written individually — relying on the other for some “in-the-room punch-ups” — and they found their styles to be quite complementary. “A lot of Jess’s songs were these old-school country waltzes, which I love,” Crutchfield said, “and it was a nice juxtaposition to the songs I was bringing in, which were a little more ’90s pop-country or Southern-rock feeling.”Williamson’s vivid songwriting and keening voice shine on “Abilene,” a heartbreaking, poetic ballad that harkens back to Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Crutchfield’s soulful “Hurricane” filters the take-me-as-I-am swagger of the Chicks through the sharp self-examination of her own songwriting, as she croons in her dusty drawl, “I come in like a cannonball/I’ve been that way my whole life.” When their voices entwine in harmony, though, as they do on the sprightly opener “Summer Sun,” all of these disparate, cross-generational influences unite to form a timeless sound.They hope their upcoming tour together will be as light and carefree as the project itself. “When you’re touring on your own record, your solo project, your life story, there’s so much pressure,” Williamson said. “This project just feels really fun and celebratory. It feels universal, in a way.”“A lot of Jess’s songs were these old-school country waltzes, which I love,” Crutchfield said, “and it was a nice juxtaposition to the songs I was bringing in, which were a little more ’90s pop-country or Southern-rock feeling.”Barrett Emke for The New York TimesFor both artists, the sound of Plains represents a kind of homecoming, since the evolution of their singing voices has reflected their own personal reckonings with their pasts.“If you only knew how hard I was trying to suppress that Southern accent for so long,” Crutchfield said. “It’s sad, I listen to the affectation on some of my earlier records and I’m like, I’m really trying hard to cover that up.”The palpable sense of self-acceptance and hard-won confidence that attracted listeners to “St. Cloud,” though, courses through “I Walked With You a Ways” as well. Crutchfield can hear that maturity in her own voice. “People grow as singers over time,” Crutchfield added. “You develop your voice and chip away at what it’s really supposed to see. As far as I’ve seen, I feel that we all get better as we age. So I think that just trying to relax a bit has helped me a lot.” She let out a deep sigh. “It almost feels like I’ve taken my bra off.”Williamson was delighted with the metaphor: “I like that image, Katie,” she said. Then, as tightly in unison as they are on their record, they laughed. More

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      Kane Brown Didn’t Fit the Country Music Mold. So He Made His Own.

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      Prejudice has followed the biracial singer from his earliest days as a performer. Now a proven hitmaker in a range of styles, he’s releasing his third album, “Different Man.”Kane Brown recently hosted a fellow country singer at his Nashville home, then paused to collect himself. “After he left,” Brown recalled, “I was like, Randy Travis really just came over and ate barbecue at my house.”The two first met at a radio station in 2016, when Travis, a Country Music Hall of Famer, surprised Brown, then a largely unknown 23-year-old, midway through a startlingly mature cover of his own 2002 hit “Three Wooden Crosses.” “I have not only become a fan of his voice, his style and talent, but of his heart, his passion and his character,” Travis wrote in an email. “If you listen to the stories his songs tell, you will understand his journey.”Earning the respect and friendship of an anointed country hero like Travis would be significant for any rising talent. But for Brown, who’s grown into a reliable hitmaker in the genre while regularly fending off gripes about whether he — a biracial man who regularly steps across stylistic borders and has worked with collaborators as diverse as Khalid, Marshmello and Becky G — even belongs among its ranks, the co-sign is especially meaningful.“It’s all the validation I need,” said Brown, now 28, as he sat on the terrace of his room at a Soho hotel last month, chewing a lump of tobacco and looking back on his path from a childhood marked by poverty and racism to America’s biggest stages.For anyone inclined to nitpick Brown’s country credentials, his third album — “Different Man,” out Friday — includes a handful of obvious targets: “See You Like I Do,” which sounds like a lost boy-band classic; “Thank God,” a touching folk-pop duet between the singer and his wife, Katelyn; and “Grand,” where Brown slips effortlessly into post-Drake R&B, chronicling life at the top and affirming that he always keeps “it trilly with the fans.”“I released ‘Grand,’ and there’s so many comments that are saying, ‘This isn’t country.’ It’s like, ‘No [expletive],’” Brown said with a mock fed-up chuckle. “I wasn’t trying to make this country.”At last, Brown said, he is done trying to micromanage his public perception. “When I first came in, with how I look — tattoos, biracial, all that stuff — I was already getting perceived as a rapper, and it kept going on for years,” ‌Brown‌ ‌said. So, he reasoned, “I might as well just take on that role.”As willing as he is to step outside country’s boundaries, Brown maintains a deep loyalty to the genre. Much of “Different Man” feels determinedly traditional: “Bury Me in Georgia,” a stomping ode to Brown’s rural Southern roots; “Pop’s Last Name,” the singer’s tender tribute to the maternal grandfather who helped raise him; and “Like I Love Country Music,” a playful, fiddle-accented romp that shows off Brown’s baritone twang and shouts out many of his key influences, including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and George Jones.Brown’s eclectic approach mirrors his own development as a fan. Moving frequently around northern Georgia and southern Tennessee with his single mother, Brown listened exclusively to country, mainly the ’90s staples she loved, like Tim McGraw, Sugarland and Shania Twain. In middle school, he branched out, checking out everything from Usher and Sisqó to AC/DC and Kid Rock. He even went through a brief pop-punk phase. “Oh, yeah, with the Vans and the skinny jeans,” Brown said. “I had my eyebrows pierced; I had my ears gauged.”Around junior year of high school, Brown started noticing country coming back into vogue. “‘Cruise’ by Florida Georgia Line had just come out,” he recalled, referring to the 2012 bro-country smash, “and you couldn’t escape that song.” He dove back into the genre, taking in work by other artists then on the ascent. Chris Young became his gold standard, thanks to his sturdy songcraft and similar baritone range.“When I found out about him, I studied every song, from his first album all the way down to what he has now,” Brown said in his deep drawl, “and that’s where I found myself wanting to sing.”Brown battled long odds to realize his dream. When he was young, he and his mother endured bouts of homelessness, often living in their car. (As Brown mentions in “Pop’s Last Name,” his father has been incarcerated since 1996; he said he visited him twice as a teenager but they had not stayed in touch.) Later on, he saw friends and relatives fall into severe drug addiction. There was one year, he said, “where I had six or seven of my friends overdose.”Brown played sports and worked a steady string of retail jobs but stayed focused on music. Inspired by his middle-school friend Lauren Alaina — with whom he’d later notch his first country No. 1, the 2017 duet “What Ifs” — he tried out for singing shows and eventually made the cut for “The X Factor.” He quit when the producers tried to funnel him into a boy band and started posting country covers to Facebook. Some went viral, as did “Used to Love You Sober,” a tear-in-your-beer original that he self-released in 2015. Soon, Brown had a deal with RCA Records Nashville.He started scoring country-chart hits and eventually teamed up with his early idol Young, on the 2021 single “Famous Friends,” one of Brown’s 21 songs to reach Billboard’s Hot 100. But his path to country success has been marked by very different obstacles than that of his white heroes. As a child, Brown only learned he was half Black when schoolmates started labeling him with a racial slur, and when he got up to sing at a high school talent show, he endured similar barrages.Now speaking as one of the few Black marquee names in country, along with Darius Rucker, Mickey Guyton and Jimmie Allen, Brown says racism is still a daily reality for him. “Even today, I walked in somewhere and they were like, ‘Oh, my God, you did so good on ‘Dancing With the Stars,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘That wasn’t me; that was Jimmie Allen. That’s the other Black guy.’”The plight of Black artists in country, and the genre’s deep-seated history of racism, is now the subject of a very public conversation, which accelerated last year when the country star Morgan Wallen was filmed using a racial slur. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Brown released “Worldwide Beautiful,” a call for unity, but he still feels constant pressure to act as a spokesman. “I guarantee you every artist probably got asked about it,” he said of the Wallen incident. But, he added, when he, Allen or Guyton were asked the question, it “was completely different than when they asked somebody else,” he said. “It’s like, they want an answer.”After staying quiet until now, he’s ready to give his take. “This is the first time I’ve ever even talked about this, but I personally know Morgan,” Brown said of Wallen, who helped write one track on his 2016 debut. “I texted him that day. I told him he shouldn’t have said it, but also knowing Morgan, I knew that he didn’t mean it in the way that the world thought that he meant it.” He’s quick to add that if he’d detected racist maliciousness in the remark, he would have taken action. “I think if it was in a different context,” he said, “I probably would have been fighting.”Brown is optimistic about country’s turn toward greater inclusivity, and ‌he recently signed the Black songwriter Levon Gray — a writer on his recent single “One Mississippi” — to a publishing deal. But he knows he’ll always have his detractors. Looking ahead to the album’s release, he’s focusing on the allies he can count on: artists who have his back, like Travis and Young; and the support system he shouts out on “Grand,” whether that’s the fans who have been helping him sell out basketball arenas nationwide on his recent Blessed & Free Tour, or his wife and two young daughters.“I used to always be nervous about what people were going to think, and I was kind of scared — I didn’t want people to think that I was leaving country music because that’s my heart,” Brown said. “But now, it’s just to the point where it’s like, I’m a dad now, two kids; I care what they think. So I’m just not that scared kid anymore.” More