“I love the curveballs,” says Zac Brown. Throwing a song into a live set that no one would expect is something Zac Brown Band has been doing for 15 years. “I love coming out with new covers every time we come to a city,” Brown tells American Songwriter. “The next time we come it’s a different show different covers, a different presentation, a different set.”
All of Zac Brown Band’s “curveballs” have also been recorded since their 2008 tour around their debut The Foundation, and 13 of them were pulled for From the Road, Vol. 1, the band’s first live album of covers.
“We put a lot of time and energy into those arrangements and just knowing the breadth of what our band can do … my band can play anything,” Brown tells American Songwriter. “We reinvent what we do after every tour to the next one, and that’s what keeps people interested in coming. They don’t know what they’re gonna get, but they do know it’s going to be good.”
From the Road, Vol. 1 is a compilation of songs stretching back more than a decade with the earliest from the band’s 2012 concert in Nashville, Tennessee, a performance of John Mayer’s 1999 “Neon” with the man himself as a special guest.
“For the last 15 years, we’ve recorded every song that we’ve ever played live, so this is the first pass through,” says Brown, who reveals a future release of their Vol. 2 of live covers. “I wanted to have a lot of variety of what we can do on this first one from Beastie Boys to Frank Sinatra and everything in between.”
There’s no chronological sequence to the album, moving from a swelling opening of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” from the band’s concert at Wembley in London, England to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” from a 2016 show in Boston, Massachusetts and through other dates in 2023. The band revisits another Boston show later with a performance of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” with Steven Tyler.
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Taking on “Bohemian Rhapsody” was a bigger challenge, requiring the band to work out the parts of the song for a year before attempting to play it live. “Freddie Mercury did 70 vocal tracks for that, and it was us boiling that down to where five people can sing it and still try to translate the parts,” says Brown. “He [Mercury] was such a genius, and he could sing it all and do it all, so boiling it down to something presentable live took us about a year of messing with it before we played it out for the first time.”
The band highlighted their harder ends with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” from a 2014 Wrigley Field concert, and the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” from another Chicago show nearly a decade later in 2023. Other covers cross The Allman Brothers Band’s “Whipping Post” with Marcus King, John Prine’s “All the Best,” and Travis Tritt’s “It’s a Good Day to Be Alive,” featuring Darrell Scott.
Musically, Zac Brown Band is all over the place, and that’s exactly what Brown wants. “Everything should have a little bit of everything sprinkled in it, so you get a journey,” he says. “An album should be a journey, and we’ve done that with our studio albums. There’s always some real heartfelt, family songs. Some songs are bluegrass. There’s some reggae. There’s some rock. There’s more traditional country.
You go on a journey when you listen to one of our albums, and I wanted the live album to be the same.”
The most recent cover on From the Road was one that hit deeper for the band. Their October 2023 cover of “Margaritaville” from the Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek in Raleigh, North Carolina was performed a little more than a month after the death of the band’s friend and collaborator Jimmy Buffett, who died on September 1 at age 76 after a long battle with a rare form of skin cancer.
Buffett was an early supporter of the band, joining them in 2009 for a performance on CMT Crossroads, then collaborating on their song “Knee Deep,” from their second album You Get What You Give, a year later. Zac Brown Band and Buffett would often perform together live whenever there was an opportunity throughout the years.
Following Buffett’s death, the Zac Brown Band joined Alan Jackson, Kenny Chesney, and Mac McAnally for a special tribute performance of “Margaritaville” during the 2023 CMA Awards. Brown and the Band also slipped in a sampling of a song they wrote in tribute to Buffett, “Pirates and Parrots,” which will be released at a later date.
The band also journeys further back to The Beatles with “Eleanor Rigby” and “With a Little Help From My Friends,” both featuring Scott and Mark O’Connor at Fenway Park in Boston. Kings of Leon’s 2008 hit “Use Somebody” even slides in before closing on the oldest song, “The Way You Look Tonight,” recorded in Irvine, California in 2016. Made famous by Frank Sinatra in 1964, the song was originally recorded by Fred Astaire for the 1936 film Swing Time, which earned it an Academy Award for Best Original Song.
In the middle of writing a new album, a follow-up to the band’s 2021 release The Comeback, Brown is also thinking back with the 15th anniversary of their debut The Foundation.
“The reason I named it ‘The Foundation’ was because I just started my foundation to build a camp for kids and veterans, Camp Southern Ground,” shares Brown. “I feel like I was given the gift of music to help create the place that we built to help people.”
Now 15 years on, Brown vividly remembers everything that happened around the making of the album. The period also marked several major milestones in his life. “We’d had a girl come do a photo shoot at my house when we did ‘The Foundation,’ and I remember seeing the pictures and thinking ‘They’re okay, but I want to do one more thing,’ so I went and got some clay out of the ground, and rubbed it all over my face and ended up standing in my shower and she took that picture of me. I remember so clearly.”
At the time, Brown had just become a father with his ex-wife Shelly, and his daughter Justice wasn’t even 1 when The Foundation hit. The album was also a breakthrough for the band, which formed in 2002. “My daughter was tiny,” remembers Brown. “She was like less than a year old. I remember very clearly where we were and what we were doing, and that was the thing that helped kick everything off for us. That was the first vehicle that helped us to travel on a tour bus rather than sleeping against a window in a truck for 10 years.”
As things got easier for the band after The Foundation, they also became more demanding, he says. “We were hanging on to a rocket ship for a lot of years just trying to figure out how to do it all because we didn’t have any precedents,” shares Brown. “We didn’t have anybody to tell us how to do it. We built our machine our way, punching ourselves in the face every way possible, figuring out how to do it, but I’m grateful for that.”
That experience made Brown appreciate every person involved with putting a show together. “A lot of times playing in bars, the last the only people that are there and listen at the end of the night are the people cleaning up, or the servers and bartenders, and I learned to appreciate people, every person. No one is greater than anyone else. I’m not any more important than any of our stagehands or our crew or anybody as a team.
Brown adds, “I’m super grateful that I’ve been able to have a life of music and dedicate myself to something that helps other people to feel good, and make their day better.”
Photo: Danny Clinch / Courtesy of The Green Room PR
