In the 15 years since the release of Zac Brown Band‘s 2008 debut The Foundation, the bedrock of the band has been carved around their 55 Grammy nominations and 13 No. 1 singles, including debut “Chicken Fried,” the Grammy-winning “As She’s Walking Away” featuring Alan Jackson, their Jimmy Buffett collaboration “Knee Deep,” and “Homegrown,” among others.
“A song is a baby,” Brown tells American Songwriter, “and as you’re raising the baby, you don’t know what it’s going to be.”
[RELATED: Zac Brown on the Band’s First Live Covers Album, 15 Years of ‘The Foundation’]
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By 2023, Zac Brown Band released their first live covers album, From the Road, Vol. 1, a compilation of performances stretching recording over more than a decade, and crossing genres, the band’s 2012 performance of John Mayer’s 1999 “Neon” through Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,”—which took the band a year to sharpen—to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” John Prine’s “All the Best,” “Metallica‘s “Enter Sandman,” and their “Margaritaville” tribute to Buffett in October 2023.
Following the band’s seventh album, The Comeback, in 2021, Brown is already deep into nearly a dozen new songs for an eighth release and spoke to American Songwriter about writing now and why he still enjoys the journey of finding the song.
American Songwriter: Thinking back on albums like Home Grown (2005) and The Foundation (2008), You Get What You Give (2010) how has songwriting shifted for you since then? Do songs still come to you in the same way?
Zac Brown: A song can come in the middle of the night. It can come in the afternoon, sitting down, or writing with someone. I’ve recently found some new people that I love writing with, and the result that comes out of that is great. That shared energy that happens is such a great exploration. I’ll sit down to write with somebody and I can generally tell within five minutes whether it’s going to work or not.
You can throw a lot of things at the wall, but you have to be open. You’re with the right people when the right line or the right melody or the right thing comes to light and you’re like “That’s it.” It doesn’t work, for a song, when there’s a huge ego in the room. You’re both fighting together to find the best options, and you usually agree on it when it’s the right people. So that’s what I’ve been searching for, and exploring, and I’m writing with a lot of my heroes. There’s going to be some amazing collaborations on this next album.
AS: As you’re working on the new album, what kind of stories are you finding yourself gravitating towards now?
ZB: It’s always on a song-by-song basis. It’s just as important what you don’t play on a song as what you do. If the production steps on the heart of the song and the emotion that’s in the song, it’s not serving it. Some songs we create should stay broken down. If you put the wrong parts in, or it’s too busy … we’ll record everything with the whole band, and then I’ll start subtracting from that and see what that sweet spot is. Everybody in my band is great about it. None of us have an ego about what we’re specifically doing for the song. Everybody’s very mindful about creating parts that serve the song and don’t take away from it.
There’s an art to the kind of movement that a song needs, or the stillness that it needs in sections, and how it builds, and where the harmonies should fit in, and how it should move. That’s what I love: crafting the song. Normally I’ll write the songs, and I’ll bring it in—just me and an acoustic guitar—and then we’ll start working through the instrumentation with the band. And sometimes some things are working, some things aren’t. Luckily, they trust me. My band is my orchestra, and I just have to follow my gut as to how it’s translating, and what it needs or doesn’t need. They’re amazing about helping me to come up with options They’re not pissed that they don’t get to play the part that they created. It’s more that they trust this is what’s going to serve the song the best, but it’s definitely a big collaboration.
AS: You can cover nearly any genre, which is evident in From the Road, Vol. 1. When you’re writing are you ever thinking “This is going to be country. This will be Americana,” or does that come later on?
ZB: A song is a baby, and as you’re raising the baby, you don’t know what it’s going to be. Then once you get the song done, and it’s working the way that you want, then you dress it with the production. It can lean one way or the other, stylistically, or go in a different place. It’s important to let the song become what it wants to be, and then figure out what kind of dress you put on.
[Get Tickets to Zac Brown Band and Kenney Chesney’s 2024 The Sun Goes Down Tour HERE]
AS: Can you still pull from within to find the story for a song, or do you find yourself looking more outward now?
ZB: There’s no formula for how a song comes, for me. It can be a phrase that I hear someone say. It can be waking up in the middle of the night with an idea for a song, or it can be collaborating and writing with people. What you do collaboratively is something different than I would have done on my own. It’s creating that circle of people to create with and then just putting in the time. After you get it written, making all the guitar parts and the nuances of it … I can tell when once I get a song written when I create my guitar parts, I can feel and kind of hear what it’s going to be. Then everybody comes together to play it and that’s how it’s born. I normally spend a lot of time writing the songs and bring them to the band. Then we put the clothes on it.
AS: Are you always writing?
ZB: I’m always writing. I’m always creating. I have about 10 [new] songs that are strong. Over the next 12 months, I’ll be writing more, and it’s exciting to have the time to put into that space. You never love a song more than when you first write it or you demo it on your phone and you’re listening back.
I love the pursuit of a song. It’s always a journey. You never know how a song is going to be born. You never know.
Photo: Terry Wyatt/Getty Images
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