American Heartbreak: A Record For Every Road

*Checks Notes* Wait a minute… this is a country album, and it’s… actually good?

Yes folks, it’s true. Now, look. I’m not here to carelessly disparage country music as a whole, or at least not as much as a lot of people might. While yes, the genre as a whole has pretty much gone stale and sold out to please the group of people who think it’s not cultural appropriation to wear a cowboy hat on Philadelphia’s Main Line, it has its time and place. I’ve been to Nashville before, and those country bars are one hell of a lot of fun.

That said, I think that even country’s biggest fans would agree with me in saying that it’s not exactly the genre I’d go to in tough times. Sometimes, there are things that require a little more than lyrics about a can of beer, a beat up old pickup truck, and the girl next door in daisy dukes to solve. Enter Zach Bryan, who has managed to break into the country scene even without a price tag on his soul.

First of all, this project sounds different than contemporary country. Where Jason Aldean and Morgan Wallen employ high-hats that would sound more at home on a Migos record, Zach Bryan never opts for much more than an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. This turn backward makes for a refreshing folk-sound which is able to take the listener along for the ride of Bryan’s rambling-man ways even from the comfort of suburbia.

Bryan’s voice also sounds great on this thing, and that’s accomplished by doing absolutely nothing to it. The vocals all over this project sound entirely untouched by post-production. This allows the listener to really hear every edge of the emotions Bryan so painstakingly pours into American Heartbreak. This is so evident that the one moment that Bryan employs some auto-tune on this project, “If She Wants a Cowboy,” is treated as a joke about the state of “Nashville country.” The untouched vocals also give this album a live feel, which in combination with its two hour run time makes it a great companion for a road trip.

This is how this album first entered my life, and what perfect timing that was. I was starting the last 10-hour leg of my drive out to Yellowstone, and about 3 hours in I finished yet another audiobook and was looking for something new to listen to. That’s when I got a text from a friend with particularly good taste, which is perhaps the only reason I even decided that an album in a genre I generally avoid might actually be worth the listen. She called it “a new soundtrack for your road-trip,” and she couldn’t possibly have been more right.

Everything about this project screams that it was made for highway living. Even the names of the tracks hint at this. We journey through a variety of places, from “The Outskirts,” “Tishomingo,” “Oklahoma City,” and “From Austin,” and we’re riding shotgun with Bryan during “High Beams,” “Highway Boys,” “’68 Fastback,” and “This Road I Know.”

And though this album’s run time of two hours feels like a hulking leviathan if you’re just sitting down to listen to a few tunes before bed, the bridges, winding curves, and hills of American Heartbreak do not once feel as though they’re overstaying their welcome when you’re pushing the limits of your rusty Silverado as I-80 cuts through Montana valleys. If anything, when this album concluded I was left wondering where all the time had flown off to, even wishing there was more (I opted to just loop it around again).

Driving down the Gallatin Gateway from Bozeman to West Yellowstone, both sides of my field of view covered with mountains and cliff faces bigger than even the largest the east coast has to offer, the perfect storm was created for me to shed that oh-so-bitter-sweet single tear that silently tells you “you’re right where you’re supposed to be.”

This album is itself a journey, whether you’re accidentally letting your foot hit the floor on a wide open highway as “Heavy Eyes” increases pace, weeping your way along a slowly sweeping road to “Morning Time,” or navigating a mountain road’s pinpoint turns while navigating tough questions begged by “Oklahoma City.” I arrived at my destination as Zach arrived at his with “This Road I Know,” feeling like I too had answered questions I’d been asking at the beginning of the journey, just as he’d answered the heartbreaking “Something in the Orange” that he’d started with.

My time with this album wasn’t over, however. The very next day, only a few hours into my first day out west, another friend texted me to ask what my thoughts were on country. “Funny enough,” I told him, “I don’t usually like it but [our mutual friend] just recommended me this album yesterday that I actually like.” As it turned out, he’d texted to recommend me the very same album, and was quite disappointed that he’d lost by 23 hours. Nonetheless, he’d had a different reason for recommending it to me, more to do with the heartbreak element of American Heartbreak.

The idea that he thought I might need that put the project into a new perspective for me, and I took to getting to know the lyrics a little better than just mindlessly mumbling them with my foot on the gas.

Listening to the lyrics more carefully, I uncovered yet another layer of beauty on this already impressive album. The songwriting on American Heartbreak is unparalleled by almost anything else I’ve ever heard. In a genre which usually sees writing neglected to make sure that songs are good-time-ready, Zach Bryan digs deep into his soul and pulls out gem after gem of honesty, introspection, and emotionality that creates an album which is best described as an expedition into the American soul.

It is sincerely difficult to even find a point of comparison for this album in terms of writing and story-telling. American Heartbreak paints the picture of a man struggling with relationships and his own tendency to run away from the problems he’s created, favoring a life of drunken highway-man debauchery that only ever lands him in trouble and distances him from his loved ones.

The albums fun, energetic moments always come with the reminder that the tradeoffs come at the expense of one’s own life, consistently being followed by tracks that explore the lonely vagabond life of a starving artist.

“Oklahoma City” is one of the album’s premier emotional moments, as Bryan poses a conversation with someone back home whose become disillusioned with his ways and lost contact with him. “Often times I pray for you and often times I don’t,” this character tells Bryan, going onto ask him whether it’s the pain of goodbyes or new hellos that’s been causing him to run away. She tells a neighbor that Zach has moved “way out west to write some songs and grow a little more bitter.” Arriving way out west with not much other than a journal, a blog, and a lost sense of direction, this lyric hit home with me in a way I wish it didn’t.

The very next track, “Sun in Me,” is a Kanye West “Runaway” moment on this project. “The only bad you’ve ever done was to see the good in me,” Bryan tells his lover. Despite these feeling of inadequacy, Bryan recalls his mother’s advice to his younger self, and how his love’s entrance into his life reflected it:

And I remember being younger and my mother told me the truth
Find someone who grows flowers in the darkest parts of you
Take heed when things get hard and don’t you ever turn around
You’ll find someone, someday, somewhere that grows you to the clouds

And you walked me home that evenin’ when I could barely walk
And you spoke to me so sweetly on the days I couldn’t talk
And now I’m seein’ clearly and I’m growin’ up so free
Sweetest of the sunflowers, yeah, you’re the sun to me

These lyrics speak for themselves, frankly. This is love song writing that Shakespeare himself would shed a tear at.

I could easily go through each and every song on this album like this. “From Austin,” “Ninth Cloud,” “Poems and Closing Time,” or “If She Wants a Cowboy,” are all such sincere expressions of life that it’s difficult to really pinpoint the best moments on this album. That being said, it’s still worthwhile to take a look at “Something in the Orange” and “This Road I Know,” the latter of which closes this thing out.

It’s been a very long time since I have spent a day without listening to “Something in the Orange.” This song is one of the most beautifully written songs I’ve ever been blessed with listening to. Let’s take a moment just to look at these lyrics:

It’ll be fine by dusk light I’m telling you, baby
These things eat at your bones and drive your young mind crazy
But when you place your head between my collar and jaw
I don’t know much but there’s no weight at all

And I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t
‘Cause if I say I miss you I know that you won’t
But I miss you in the mornings when I see the sun
Something in the orange tells me we’re not done 

To you I’m just a man, to me you’re all I am
Where the hell am I supposed to go? 
I poisoned myself again
Something in the orange tells me you’re never coming home

I need to hear you say you’ve been waitin’ all night
There’s orange dancing in your eyes from bulb light
Your voice only trembles when you try to speak 
Take me back to us dancing, this wood used to creak 

To you I’m just a man, to me you’re all I am 
Where the hell am I supposed to go? 
I poisoned myself again 
Something in the orange tells me you’re never coming home

To you I’m just a man, to me you’re all I am
Where the hell am I supposed to go? 
I poisoned myself again
Something in the orange tells me you’re never coming home

If you leave today, I’ll just stare at the way
The orange touches all things around
The grass, trees and dew, how I just hate you
Please turn those headlights around
Please turn those headlights around

This track is a masterpiece, even by itself. Bryan presents love in a strained relationship in all of its complexity. The anger alongside yearning shown in “Grass, trees, and dew, how I just hate you, please turn those headlights around.” The painful knowing that “if I say I miss you I know that you won’t.” This track is painfully gorgeous in every way. It’s a heartfelt moment of admission of inadequacy, dependance on someone else, and begging for a love that might be dead.

Luckily, Bryan closes American Heartbreak with the answer. The very same friend who first recommended this album to me was also the one who asked me to “listen to Something in the Orange and then This Road I Know, just trust me.” Once again, she was right.

Each painful question and admission in “Something in the Orange” finds its answer on “This Road I Know,” giving the forebodingly titled American Heartbreak something of a happy ending.

In a dream, Bryan finds that that orange bulb is one he’s always known, where a brown haired girl greets him asking where he’s been. All the people he’s never known, but knows exactly who they are, are right there with them as she tucks her head between his collar and jaw, and just like before, there’s no weight at all.

As the album closes, Bryan ends things hopefully:

It’s laughter and greens and no tomorrow to win
And I don’t know where I am but I know exactly where I am
I don’t know where I am but I know exactly where I am

I’d had similar feelings arriving to my new home in West Yellowstone. Two thousand, two hundred, and four miles from what had always been home, I couldn’t help but to feel the exact same. It’d been years since I’d seen the American west, and by then I’d forgotten all about the mountain peaks and vast forests that now stretched before me, endlessly. I had no bearing on where I was, no clue where the nearest grocery store was, and having recently graduated, I had a much more existential sense of not knowing which way was up.

Still, with Bryan in my ears and the mountains before me, I couldn’t help but to feel that perhaps, in life and in bodily presence, I was exactly where I needed to be.

I cannot recommend this album enough. Whether you’re looking for the soundtrack to your next road trip, the antidote to your heartbreak, or just a damn good country album full of a soul that’s attuned to itself, American Heartbreak should be on your queue ASAP.