The barricade of Zach Bryan‘s headlining set at Franklin, Tennessee’s Pilgrimage Festival got a little hardcore. The crowd closest to the stage was packed with teenagers and folks in their early 20s, and almost none of them were from the Nashville area. Two best friends flew down from Boston and were at the festival gates before opening to secure their spots; the couple next to them came in from Kentucky just to see Bryan. One young woman claimed it was cheaper for her to buy VIP tickets to the annual country-Americana festival than it would’ve been to try and find resale tickets for one of his shows this fall, and at the time of writing, the least expensive ticket for Bryan’s show at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center is indeed $350 on Ticketmaster.
“No one this close to the stage got here any later than noon,” one fan told me. “Except for you guys.” (It seems she’s a little miffed at the media setup towards the front.)
Zach Bryan was still an active member of the US Navy when he signed with Warner Records in the spring of 2021, and his star has been rising ever since his honorable discharge from service. Viral moments in “Heading South” and “Something in the Orange” melted smoothly into sprawling and more-than full-length country records — 2022’s American Heartbreak is 34 tracks long and takes over two hours from start to finish, markedly different from the industry standards prioritizing hooks and soundbite potential.
Even so, it takes more than a strong pen to go from earning interested listeners to getting people to fly from around the country for a festival appearance in such a short span. Bryan has developed a bit of an outlaw reputation, and some of that stems from the intentional distance he’s maintained from Nashville. He keeps Music Row’s machines at an arm’s length and has been vocal about his desire to avoid the slick, overproduced style that has been the standard for male artists in particular.
With little fanfare, Bryan kicked things off with “Open the Gate” before proceeding to play for over two hours. His backing band is made up of strong musicians, many of whom physically tower over Bryan, but he’s undeniably the star of the show onstage. His vocals, gravely on a record, are shockingly raspy in a setting like this, and his expression often veered into something wild and frantic when he performed, appropriate for a set closer like “Revival.” And, despite Bryan’s refusal to slide into the shiny systems waiting for him just north of the festival grounds in Nashville, he greeted the Tennessee crowd warmly. “I can’t believe this is my life,” he said, more than once.
Pilgrimage marked Bryan’s first concert since an arrest in Oklahoma, which prompted his mugshot to briefly grace the cover of Spotify’s “Outlaw Country” playlist. In a statement, he apologized for the incident and said he “supports law enforcement as much as anyone can” — a fascinatingly vague bar to set — but the arrest certainly didn’t dramatically shift loyalties within his primary fanbase. More than one attendee was wearing a shirt with the mugshot, and when a flag with the image was hoisted somewhere in the crowd, it was met with enthusiastic cheers. Rather, fans seem more put off by the fact that for his upcoming “Quittin’ Time Tour,” he went forward with Ticketmaster after an initial boycott. “One guy can’t change the whole system,” he’d said.
