With Heaven On Top

Sound DNA

• Folk
• Singer-Songwriter

• stripped-back
• earnest
• heartland

About

Oklahoma singer-songwriter Zach Bryan remains something of a cipher four years after his triple-album major-label debut <i>American Heartbreak</i>: an introspective, headstrong superstar who rejects the trappings of fame while selling out arenas, a Navy cadet turned folk hero who now finds himself atop the pop and country charts despite not really making country music, or pop songs, or “hits.” Bryan’s songs are intense and writerly, inclined towards nostalgia and grief and favoring bare arrangements, live takes, and studio chatter. He embraces contradiction, avoids sloganeering, and is not soon to die on any one particular hill. He also likes to begin his albums with spoken-word poetry, as on 2023’s self-titled album and 2024’s <i>The Great American Bar Scene</i>. His sixth album, <i>With Heaven on Top</i>, opens with a spoken-word story where a long talk with the former owner of his new NYC home leads him to a dream where he is standing in a stream, somewhere in Oklahoma. “Every good and bad thing that had ever happened to me, floating down, downstream,” he narrates as memories rush past, memories of dive bars and hunting trips, every woman he ever loved, all the fights and laughter and victories and failures that amount to a man’s life. Most of the 24 tracks of <i>With Heaven on Top</i> find the singer on the road, having flung himself across America to play shows that are transcendent and exhausting, or to escape from something, potentially himself. Sometimes these itinerant vignettes are distant memories—eating runny eggs in a diner in California, spending his last dollar on malt liquor in Ohio, sleeping in a camper van in Santa Fe. “Best Western is where I call home,” Bryan sings on “Miles,” keeping company with the Bible in the dresser drawer. Harmonica and pedal steel drift through like a dream. Songs like “Slicked Back” and “Appetite” sound brighter than Bryan’s usual fare, occasionally welcoming a horn section into the mix. But the intimacy remains as the perpetual outsider weathers “corny shit” like stardom, grapples with familiar demons, and searches the country for someplace to call home. Of course, you can’t write great American records from the comfort of your couch, as he reminds us on the title track: “You won’t find no answers safe at home/You can’t learn heartbreak from a poem.” For all that, the open road stretches on.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits