The first two songs Zach Bryan played at the United Center on Tuesday night were from the more muscular end of his catalog. They landed hard and quick — Bryan was singing with a rugged howl, guitars were churning, the fiddle poked through the top like a squeal. This was opening night of The Quittin Time Tour, and the first of three sold-out shows here, and he was wasting no time pumping the audience into a frenzy.
Then he needed them to breathe — maybe he needed to breathe — and so next came “God Speed,” one of the most delicate and precise entries in Bryan’s catalog. It’s a song about surrender and, most importantly, hope, that rests entirely on his strummed acoustic guitar and determined, dusty voice. Bryan pulled his vocals back to let the words sink in, but somehow the crowd got louder and more committed, turning the song into a hymn. In a room of over 20,000 people, everyone was singing, yet somehow it was eerily quiet — the loudest hush imaginable.
Bryan, 27, is a singer whose hollers feel like hugs and whose laments land with a roar. For the past few years, his country-rock-adjacent rumbles have been inspiring a level of fevered devotion that has made him one of music’s most popular and least expected new stars. “Zach Bryan,” his second major-label album, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart last year, and its lead single, “I Remember Everything,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, reached the top of the Hot 100. Half a year later, the song remains in the Top 10.
A Bryan live show is rooted in his sandpapered voice, his modest affect and his band’s surprisingly jubilant musical arrangements. But just as crucial is the crowd shout-along. It is something slightly different than a regular singalong; the harmony it suggests veers past musical to the emotional.
A couple of years ago, Bryan’s audience was packed with young men who sang his scraped-up songs unselfconsciously back to him. It all had the eau de Springsteen — deploying the magic of seeing a tough, resilient man confess to something much more wounded and ambiguous. But while that’s still part of the appeal, his crowd has expanded. There are more women now, and loads of teenagers, too, an indication of Bryan’s reach even if he has yet to become a traditional radio presence, and even if his allegiance to country music — which he toys with, and which the crowd’s outfits suggested an affinity for — is fickle.
This show, like his albums, was uproarious but not unfocused: a two-hour tour of songs about stubbornness and mistake-making, flecked with flashes of tenderness that gleam so brightly because everything around them is scuffed beyond repair.
The brawnier songs were effective, including “Open the Gate,” “Heading South” and “Nine Ball,” during which the track’s video, starring Matthew McConaughey, played on screens near the ceiling. Bryan’s band knows how to extract antic energy from just a handful of small parts, particularly Read Connolly on lap steel and banjo, J.R. Carroll on keyboard and Lucas Ruge-Jones on fiddle and sometimes trumpet.
But Bryan is at heart a sentimentalist. He writes about the present with the patina of retelling the past, a gesture that underscores how little distance there is between something happening right now and the memory you’re left holding onto. His most effective gambit is bringing thousands of people into the dimly lit corners of his songs.
“’68 Fastback” was heart-rending: “To you I’m just salvage/I ain’t ran right in years/So drive me then gut me.” And Bryan was particularly vivid when invoking the unsteady concept of home, whether on the bracing “Oklahoma Smokeshow,” or “Tishomingo,” which opened with the disarming sigh, “I don’t think that the city moves slow enough for me.”
“Highway Boys,” which on the surface is a toast to the compatriots that make life on the road manageable, actually turned on a more gentle commandment: “If you need me, call/If you’re in love, fall.” And it’s hard to imagine a contemporary American songbook without “God Speed,” from his self-released 2019 album “DeAnn,” which marked Bryan as a singer and writer of uncommon vigor.
Even Bryan’s biggest hits were effectively small ruminations: an aching “Something in the Orange,” and “I Remember Everything,” on which Bryan was joined by Musgraves, a pair of interior singers reckoning with the certainty of a song loved by millions.
When Musgraves left the stage, Bryan quipped, “You kidding me?” This, too, is part of Bryan’s arsenal — the modesty. Throughout the show, he was constantly acknowledging his luck, and the purported (and untrue) rustiness of him and the band: “I’m so sorry if you were having a good evening and we ruined it.”
He played on a huge cross-shaped stage at the center of the arena floor — a pumped-up version of playing in the round — and spent much of his time dutifully marching from promontory to promontory to make sure each side of the room got its face time. And he played to the local crowd with a T-shirt celebrating the Chicago Bulls’ 1995-96 season in which they went 72-10, then the best regular-season record of all time.
After a show full of grand-scale renderings of small-bore apprehensions, he closed with “Quittin’ Time,” with a rambunctious banjo and the fist-pumping exhortation, “I can’t wait to head on home, so I can take my gal to dance.” And then, after a slightly awkward break, Bryan and the band returned to the stage for a 10-minute single-song encore of “Revival,” an enthusiastic celebration of misbehavior. It was boisterous and free, chatty and ecstatic; T-shirt cannons fired tight packages into the crowd.
It was sort of a repayment and a release for a night of close attention and assistance. When Bryan yelped, the crowd yelped. When he whispered, they whispered, too. Sometimes, it was unclear where the line between observation and participation really was. Near the end of “Something in the Orange,” Bryan said, “I trust you guys,” and walked away from the microphone.
The Quittin Time Tour continues in Chicago on Wednesday and Thursday, and runs through Dec. 19 in Brooklyn; zachbryan.com/tour.
