Oh Great. Yet Another Zac Brown Band “Reinvention”

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photo: Tyler Lord

The Band Perry, eat your heart out. If there’s any band that can best all comers with with their constant “reinventions,” dramatically over-promising and spectacularly under-delivering, it’s the Zac Brown Band. When you’ve somehow been impossibly vanquished by Old Dominion in the CMA’s Best Vocal Group category for seven straight years (and by Little Big Town for five straight years before that), you know you’re bringing up the rear in popular county.

From a cornpone country band from Georgia selling out with “Chicken Fried,” to thinking they’re the next Southern rock jam band and generally failing, to Zach completely losing the plot and deciding he was the next EDM DJ the world was waiting for with his Sir Rosevelt, Jekyll+ Hyde, and The Controversy shtick, to then Zac returning to his country roots like a dog with his tail between his legs with generally country-sounding but rather passionless tracks, Zach Brown has truly explored the full range of sucking in American music.

But what sucks the most is that you feel that beneath the manic approach to making music is a skilled musician fronting an incredible band, cursed by being unable to set a compass point, and falling for the self-canard that different is somehow “creative” or “better.” Zac Brown also might suffer from a little old-fashioned self-absorbed megalomania.

Oh but trust Zac Brown this time. It’s this reinvention that is superior to all others. Recently the band’s social media was scrubbed and then proclaimed, “There’s no way to sum up what the last chapter has meant to us…The next chapter? It’s the biggest one yet,” before announcing a new album called Love & Fear out December 5th, and a 4-night residency at the Las Vegas Sphere.

Zac Brown is calling this latest chapter “2.0 for our band. There’s some bands, they keep going for a while and then they kind of get tired, they stop. But my passion and my creativity is as good now as it’s ever been, and I just want to keep pushing the envelope of what our band is capable of and bringing our fans along for the ride… This is our chance to show that we’re not slowing down. We’ve actually got our foot on the gas.”

And what has all this rhetoric about rabid creativity and brave reinvention led to? A vapid song with an island beat and a bad AI-generated video, and a stupid and cussy stoner song featuring Snoop Dogg. Not exactly the riveting, intellectually stimulating outcome we might expect from all the boisterous promotional copy. But again, this is only the Zac Brown Band.


You get the sense that the folks who’ve fallen for the Zac Brown Band mythology consider this all on the same level as The Grateful Dead phenomenon, or Billy Strings—strikingly innovative and untethered by genre, boldly exploring the very edges of music.

Zach Brown says about the shows at The Sphere they’re choreographing, “Every single detail of [the] show [will] be extremely memorable … make people’s eyes bleed and make them feel every range of the human emotion that we’re capable of. Our challenge for ourselves is to raise the bar … It’s this massive creative mountain, but I absolutely love it, and I’m obsessed with it.”

Yet releasing a stoner track with Snoop Dogg, which is about the most cliché move possible is what you wet our whistles with? What, did Willie Nelson tell you to go kick rocks?


If Zac Brown wants to release a couple of stupid songs, he should have every right. This is what our grandfather’s stormed the beaches of Normandy for, or something. But for the love of all things holy, tone down the self-absorbed rhetoric. You’re just trying to keep the cash cow mooing at this point.

And none of this broaches the disturbing accusations from Zac Brown’s ex, which according to her, is being sued into submission by Zac “as a means to control and intimidate me,” Kelly Yazdi says. “I have to stand up for myself, and for anyone who has ever felt controlled or silenced by someone with more power and resources.”

Of course, there’s two sides to all of these stories and divorces can be messy. But nobody should need a reminder that Zac Brown can be messy all on his own.

When Zac Brown Band’s new album Love & Fear arrives on December 5th, we’ll give it a fair and impartial listen. Or maybe we’ll blow it off after getting blitzed at the office Christmas party the night before. But after reading his hyperbolic comments and then listening to the first two deflating singles, don’t blame us for being suspicious that Zac Brown Band ver. 9.0 is simply more of the same.

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