Not for the first time today, Zach Bryan makes his new friend laugh. Bryan tries to adjust himself on a soft white studio couch for a filmed conversation and it embarrasses him. “Do I look pompous with my legs crossed?” he asks.
The person sitting next to him, Bruce Springsteen, who owns the couch, the studio and the entire farm in Colts Neck, New Jersey, can hardly contain his laughter and interjects: “What degree of pompousness does I have on this thing?”
Bryan spent his childhood on a naval base in Okinawa, Japan, and then in Oklahoma – a world away from Monmouth County, New Jersey. He was just six years old when “The Rising” was released. Nevertheless, Springsteen is one of his greatest heroes. He has lyrics from the Nebraska song “State Trooper” (“Deliver me from nowhere”) tattooed on his left bicep. Springsteen, for his part, has become a big fan of Bryan, whose finely crafted, down-to-earth, American-life narratives owe more than a little to the older man’s songwriting. On Bryan’s first two albums he is primarily accompanied by acoustic guitar and harmonica, in the style of “Nebraska”.
Mutual admiration
Springsteen admires the precision, energy and intelligence of Bryan’s songwriting. But he’s also clearly taken by the 28-year-old Navy veteran’s obvious hero worship, his fresh and easy-going energy and his unrelenting sincerity. Springsteen played his first stadium concerts twelve years after beginning his recording career; Bryan is already in the same position after five years. Since his 2019 debut, “DeAnn,” named after his late mother, Bryan has released more than a hundred songs. Understandably, he is still unsettled by the speed at which his life has changed. Much like Springsteen, he makes music that feels like the work of a cult-revered hero who has somehow broken through to the mainstream. When he sits down with Springsteen, it’s late April, and his latest hit album, “The Great American Bar Scene” (with another nod to “Nebraska” in the title track’s lyrics), is still a work in progress.
In fact, he still records some of it today. After finishing their conversation, the two artists go next door to record Springsteen’s vocals for the extraordinary song “Sandpaper,” which they first performed on stage in Brooklyn. The song ends up sounding like a conversation between an older man and his former self. Springsteen pours the entire weight of his years into melancholic, image-rich lyrics that he could have written himself.
“To this day I suffer from really bad impostor syndrome.”
Springsteen: You started playing when you were 14. That’s young, if I’m not mistaken.
Bryan: 14, yes sir.
Springsteen: And when you were 17 you joined the Navy. I’m very curious about how your time in the Navy affected your songwriting and when you started considering yourself a serious songwriter.
Bryan: I still don’t know! To this day I suffer from really bad imposter syndrome. But I had a lot of friends in the Navy, and we’d go out to the bars and have a good time, and I’d go back to my room in the barracks and sing about it. I never had anything else to express myself. You work so much that you never really have time to talk about these things.
So I went home and wrote, and I never in a million years would have dreamed that I would be a songwriter because I never thought I had the talent. And that’s not false modesty, I just never in a million years would have dreamed that I would be sitting here with you. Because we heard your songs back then and they are beautiful, poetic and brilliant. When I play (my songs), I think: There’s no way people will like them as much as a Dylan song or a Springsteen song or something like that.
Have your creative aspirations and inspirations changed as you grew older? Or do you still have the same goal as before?
Springsteen: The same goal as when I was 15, to this day. So that’s 60 years. And basically it’s about: Hey, we come on stage at night and give it everything we’ve got. This may be the last night we play. This may be the last audience we see. I’ve been doing this for 60 years. Songwriting is hard. And I don’t think I really felt comfortable with the idea that I was writing good songs until I was about 22 or 23, when I wrote the songs for my first record, a record called “Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ.” , which came out in 1973. Is that true: you only had your first public appearance in 2019?
Bryan: That’s funny because when I was in the Navy… there’s a Potbelly sandwich shop. They called me and said, “You should come all day and play for nine hours.” I remember playing for those nine hours. I only played covers. And they gave me a check for $60. I took it and thought: Oh, I’m a professional musician now!
Springsteen: It’s incredible when your first public performance was in 2019 and now you’re playing sold out arenas and have some stadium performances coming up. This is crazy!
“We come on stage in the evening and give everything we have. This may be the last night we play. This may be the last audience we see.”
Bryan: For us too! Because the guys in my band are the same guys I went to high school with. When we watch the tour we ask ourselves: What happened? When it comes to your music, it’s like, “Oh, he wrote ‘Born To Run.’ So that’s what happened. He wrote ‘Dancing In The Dark,’ so that went off with Bruce Springsteen.” For us, it’s all these random songs that we threw into a fan.
Springsteen: That’s not how it reads, man. You’ve got “Open The Gate”, you’ve got “Revival” – these are songs you’ll be singing until you’re my age, you know that?
Bryan: How have you managed to maintain a love of music after being Bruce Springsteen for all these years?
Springsteen: Music isn’t hard to love. You have to put it in context and put the rest of the things that come with it in perspective.
Bryan: The small group of people that you played for, that you thought you would play for your whole life, have you kept that in your heart all this time until now?
Springsteen: That’s the key. It’s really about seeing yourself, your possibilities, your abilities, the kind of joy you can bring into the world if you can and that you can give to people. Music is powerful, man. Poetry is powerful.
“I didn’t want to lose touch with who I was and the place I came from.”
Bryan: This is what I learned along the way. I didn’t realize how powerful she was until I started. Have you ever had a moment where you felt like you were “Springsteen” in your heart?
Springsteen: That’s the part of me that I downplayed because hey, I’m a songwriter, I’m from here. I stayed here. Except for a short time we spent on the West Coast when my children were very young. I’ve lived here in this place my whole life, near a group of people I cared about. And I wanted to write music that I thought would just stay meaningful. I didn’t want to lose touch with who I was and the place I came from. I thought these things were essential to my mental health. Not necessarily for my success, but for my own mental health, for my own well-being. And that kept me on a certain path for a long time.
Bryan: There was a quote somewhere about writing “Nebraska” that really resonated with me: “I know that with ‘Nebraska,’ I was interested in making myself as invisible as possible.” That’s my favorite record of all that have ever been written.
“I went through some things I didn’t even know I was going through.”
Springsteen: “Nebraska” came about by chance. I was just trying to save money in the studio. In 1981 I had the greatest success I’ve ever had. We had a hit single, “Hungry Heart.” But I was already wondering: some of what we do can feel dangerous to the inner life. My idea was: I’m going to take it a little slower, I’m going to slow it down a little.
Bryan: I’m at this exact point in my writing and my career right now. I think: Oh, wow, I got off the ground really quickly!
Springsteen: You are.
Bryan: I moved up really quickly. But now, at this point, I can’t even catch up with my own tailwind. It just feels like I’ve put out so much music that people have read so much into it. But really I was just writing music and now I need to slow down and settle in.
Springsteen: You have to listen to your inner voice – that’s really important. When “Nebraska” came around, I initially just thought: I just want to record a few songs so I don’t spend all my money on the studio. The strange thing is that I did “Nebraska” and “Born In The USA” at the exact same time. So I had the recordings of “Born In The USA” and knew that this thing was lightning in a bottle. And then I have my demos of “Nebraska,” and I’m really drawn in…
Bryan: …of murder, of serial killers!
Springsteen: Exactly.
Bryan: Did you feel as dark as those songs sounded at that point in your life? Or were you as a songwriter happy about how dark these songs sounded?
Springsteen: When I look at what happened to me in the year or so after writing the record, I went through some things that I didn’t even know I was going through. I have struggled with depression in my life. And I have my medication to keep me sane, but at the time I had none of it. And it was really the case that at a certain moment I personally reached my limits. I always think that recordings are premonitions of what will then emerge in consciousness, and that you emerge from your own subconscious immediately after what you have created.
“I felt this conflict myself, being two different people.”
Bryan: As for “Born In The USA” and “Nebraska,” those two records are perceived as coming from two different songwriters. It’s so crazy!
Springsteen: I felt this conflict myself, being two different people.
Bryan: But that’s what makes you good at it, that’s the funny thing.
Springsteen: It gives the work an unusual range. It was unusual to go from an album like Nebraska to Born In The USA, which I knew was going to be a successful album, but I had no idea it was going to be this successful.
Bryan: To this day we have this gag, me and my band, where we go to a bar – there is now (the interactive music and entertainment platform for restaurants) TouchTunes, yes? So we go in and put “Born In The USA” on repeat 200 times. And we’ll see who goes. We’ll hang out with the people who stay.
Springsteen: This is crazy, my friend!
[…]
Interview: Brian Hiatt
The full conversation appeared in the December issue of ROLLING STONE.