If you wanted to be all buzzy and clickbaity about it, you could proclaim “Marcus King goes country!” or “Marcus King releases a country album!” But that’s not really what’s going on here.
Even before Jesse Welles wrote, recorded, and released this fully formed 10-song studio album amid sometimes daily song releases on social media, his musical output hovered somewhere near the impossible.
Similar to Zach Bryan, it’s hard to understate how massive Sam Barber has become. That’s not all that’s similar about Zach Bryan. You listen to ‘Restless Mind,’ and you could easily be convinced it’s a Zach Bryan album.
“Trail of Flowers” will find the West Virginia songwriter and superlative live performer taking listeners on a fantastic journey through the familiar and surreal as she takes Appalachian music and instills it with a thrust of mirth and mystery.
34 songs? Hell, why not. Stroke your chin and espouse all the conventional wisdom about music that you want, including what a boner Zach Bryan is pulling here with this hard drive dump of an album. Then sit back and watch as this thing tops the charts.
Zach Bryan is just touched in a way where poetic recitation or interpretation of events either real life or imaginative is so natural to him, the words flow like water, and order themselves in ways that are both intuitive and inviting to the audience. His effortlessness at writing songs is the envy of all writers.