Returning to songs we don’t hate…
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[7.07]
Nortey Dowuona: Every funeral is for the living. The things the dead loathed, were irritated by, or never wanted spoken are done at a funeral, often proudly and brazenly, since the dead are beyond our reach and beyond our reproach. Their deeply damning or deeply moving behavior has become a part of legend and contemplation, rather than constantly changing with each day they live. After a while our decaying memories are all we have. Each day you see a picture of the dead you remember how little of the real, breathing person remains. It’s worst when it’s your mother. Boys, even those who loathe them, are loath to reproach or even damn their mothers, because adhering to the comforting fiction that your mother loves and adores you without reservation provides you with a relief and comfort. But every mother has reservations, frustrations, traditions adopted to keep each child alive and breathing. Most mothers try to love and care for their children, often because they know that no one else in this world will. But it is very difficult to actually love a person, not a picture and a memory. And sometimes a person will lie about being a little bit taller, and you will laugh, then one day look at the notches made in a pine doorway, realizing you should’ve keep letting her make them, realizing you will forget these notches because the person who remembers how to make them is gone and didn’t tell you how.
[9]
Mark Sinker: “The kids are in town for a funeral” is a terrific opening line, and the fragments that follow of undilutedly exact observation are also good. They ground the mood of the the sound, which uses squirts of Dylan-style mouth-harp to say this is us NOW, as it’s been as long as any of us could know: time-bound yet also timeless, just like the sky. The form is gradual surprise reveal — who died? who’s the song’s “you”? — and the reason it doesn’t really work is that it ends up trying for a kind of quasi-mythic forwards-backwards doubleness (you will have been who we all always were), which instead dissipates into a cyclic melancholic vagueness.
[5]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Grief is a hard subject to sing about, but Zach Bryan makes it easy by never raising his voice above a soft whisper, as if he’s speaking directly to you. The harmonica does the heavy emotional lifting, an aural release of all of the big emotions that haven’t been shared. When Bryan finally does raise his voice once or twice, the effect is deafening.
[8]
Hannah Jocelyn: A Zach Bryan song with interesting production, hallelujah! The slight formant-shifting on the backing vocals (courtesy of Emily Frantz from Watchhouse), the distorted vocal doubles, and the subtle distorted guitar in the right channel show an attention to detail I haven’t heard before. Ironically, this song doesn’t need all that; this is just a sharp, thoughtful song about going to the funeral of a parent and doesn’t need to be much more. You can tell it’s by a guy that worships Jason Isbell and sells out arenas, but the modesty makes lines about cleaning the person’s house or helping someone without judgement hit harder.
[8]
Taylor Alatorre: The balancing act of Zach Bryan’s success is that he instinctively avoids tethering himself to the orthodoxies of country music, contemporary or traditional, while also not making a virtue of being “unorthodox” for the sake of it. His persona as the regular guy who snuck his way onto Music Row feels less contrived on record than on paper, and when he describes his songs as “poems,” he isn’t trying to lord it over anyone — that’s genuinely what they are to him. These tendencies serve Bryan well on “Pink Skies,” a not-quite-country not-quite-ballad about a thoroughly unremarkable funeral. He makes no effort to scrub the harmonica part of its Bob Dylan associations, because why should he? It serves the larger goal of bringing the past into a visible, tangible communion with the present, just as the trans-temporal horizon of the title does. At times this between-past-and-present approach comes off as indecisiveness, as if Bryan himself is unsure whether he’s meant to be addressing the living or the dead. But maybe that’s an inevitable byproduct of the subject, which is not just the funeral itself but the essential messiness and awkwardness of attending one as an uprooted young adult.
[7]
TA Inskeep: Musically this wants to be ’64 Dylan, but lyrically it’s a C+ Creative Writing class poem. Bryan’s flat, almost emotionless vocal does it no favors.
[3]
Katherine St. Asaph: For all its signifiers of man-hewn realness, “Pink Skies” is not that different from a hypothetical AI shitpost of Bob Dylan singing in a bananies-and-avocadies voice.
[4]
Brad Shoup: This is Saddle Creek emo—the gulped vowels, the voice-cracking yelps, the Brechtian backing-player inserts that have the very anti-Brechtian effect of heightening sentimentality. (The “you’d think they’s yuppies” bit is funnier as an aside than part of the chorus—say what you will about Music Row, but nine out of ten Nashville writers would have left it to shine in a verse.) Bryan does a tremendous job of seeing the loss while looking past it; he comes across as the pragmatic child, the one who’s quick to put everything into perspective, even if it makes the view smaller. The last line of the chorus is an all-timer, and Bryan delivers it like a rallying cry, a comfort for everyone left. And he takes care that its first appearance lands the hardest. I guess what nags at me is that this is a tidy song that in its desire to become something more—to pretend that “no one’s ever been here before or at all”—ends up creating clutter. And I don’t need that clutter: I’m already dealing with chord changes that remind me of David Nail’s “Red Light” (a breakup tune that’s somehow more bereaved and existential) and a backporch lurch that recalls M Ward’s “Requiem,” a eulogy that, in centering its subject, still tells you everything about the speaker.
[6]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Every Zach Bryan single creeps closer to greatness and catastrophe. Doing a full “Tangled Up in Blue” pastiche nine months after starting his last album off with a “Born to Run”-alike would be a galling work of ego if he didn’t stick the landing. I feel like such a sap to be taken in by him, but the rootsy gestures and artfully plainspoken lyrics work on me truly and completely. “Pink Skies” succeeds because of how the track doesn’t quite build but unfurl, how the clipped to-do list of “clean the house/clear the drawers/mop the floors/stand tall” overflows into “like no one’s ever been here before or at all” and how the harmonica and endlessly trilling mandolin just grow and grow as the song goes on. This wouldn’t work at all if not for Bryan’s vocal performance — he mutters and intones and, finally, raises himself into a mournful little yowl, communicating the utter unfurling of grief — the kaleidoscopic feeling his verses get at, the constantly shifting “you” he aims at but never quite embraces.
[9]
Alfred Soto: Plainspokenness is not itself a virtue: plenty of plainspoken people are simpletons. Zach Bryan ain’t a simpleton, but when his thoughts don’t match his singsong melodies he’s like an old-timer in a diner insisting on discussing the weather with Shakespearean gravity. On the other hand, songs about funerals and thrift stores dressed up with harmonicas don’t often enter the Billboard top ten on streaming numbers alone. We dwell in grief, our pop songs la la la la past it.
[6]
Andrew Karpan: Instantly one of the great songs of Bryan’s latest era of making these kind of grand statements of melancholy wistfulness, an intimate few minutes that suggests a future of cooking Neil Young covers for sports networks or whatever that looks like in the 2030s.
[8]
Jeffrey Brister: Dusky, Springsteen-style arrangement with bluegrass flourishes? Raspy vocal? Impressionistic lyrics that convey specificity and emotion without being overly wordy? A performance that evokes joy in the midst of pain and mourning? Let me get out my big rubber stamp that says “EXTREMELY MY SHIT.”
[9]
Jonathan Bradley: “Pink Skies” is not among Zach Bryan’s best songs: its narrative fuzzes around the edges too much, resting excessively on the weight carried by old memories and the literary power of “the kids are in town for a funeral” as a scene setter. It has me expecting a short story, and he delivers gesture and elision: “never said a thing about Jesus or the way he’s living” is an aside that longs for a more developed narrative. But goodness me if he can’t make anything sound good when he hits his high register and belts out a line like “I bet God heard you coming.” It’s not even the words; anything would sound transportive transmitted through that howl. I hope he never realizes how effective a weapon he wields there.
[8]
Ian Mathers: This is just too solidly and straightforwardly good in a way that hits me pretty deep and makes me think too much about the last couple of memorials I’ve been to for me to say anything clever about it. Fuckin’ good song, though.
[9]