Zach Bryan Cites Evan Felker, Jason Isbell for Inspiring His Sobriety

Zach Bryan has just released a new 8-song EP called Young Manhood and Other Donatable Organs. And to promote the EP, he’s released a two-hour interview with Matthew McConaughey, taped at Zach’s new house and property in the Lieper’s Fork area about 25 miles outside of Nashville. Zach Bryan pretty famously conducts interviews only very rarely, but made an exception when McConaughey came calling.

There’s a lot of great insight to pull from the interview about Zach Bryan’s life, his current state of mind about music, and how he sees himself at 30 transitioning from young manhood to middle manhood, and trying to move on from past lessons and mistakes. That’s part of the inspiration for the EP’s new title, and for the artwork of Bryan shooting a gun at himself—symbolizing killing his old self off each day.

The other inspiration for the EP’s title is when Bryan was in the hospital with his mother DeAnn, holding her hand in her last moments and processing his grief, and someone showed up with a clipboard asking him if he wanted to donate her organs. It felt like a metaphor for how no matter how much they give, they still want more from you at the end of your life.

Though a lot is covered in the two-hour sit down, perhaps the most intriguing part of the interview is when Zach Bryan discusses his decision to get sober. Bryan made a pretty high-profile proclamation about his sobriety earlier this year, and now says it’s been nine months since he took a drink.

When Matthew McConaughey asked him if it was easier or harder to write a song sober, Zach Bryan responds,

I’ve always drank before I wrote because I thought it had some magic Kerouac thing. I thought it bred more creativity. This is the first project I’ve ever done—this ‘Young Manhood’ thing—that I didn’t drink a lick. I wrote every word sober, and I sang every word sober. And I’ll say, it took that to prove to me that I could do it. And I think the EP’s pretty great. I always thought that I had to drink to be creative at all.

I think I’ve had this fear about because … I mean I hope he doesn’t mind me mentioning his name, he’s on the EP, but Evan Felker, he had a pretty public run-in with sobriety. And after he got sober, I was scared that his music was going to be different. And I feared that for a long time. And then he came out with “A Cat in the Rain” and “Price of Admission,” blew every expectation. I think the songs he wrote afterwards were more important than the songs he wrote before. And that changed my opinion on it completely. And when I heard that, [I thought] if he can do it, I can do it.

Evan Felker is the frontman for the Turnpike Troubadours, whose last album The Price of Admission was considered the best in country in 2025 by many. Felker and the Troubadours famously took an indefinite hiatus as Felker worked to get sober. Felker and Turnpike fiddle player Kyle Nix appear on Zach’s new song “Plainsman.”

Zach Bryan goes on to say,

[Jason] Isbell’s helped me a lot too. Isbell wrote all his greatest … he told me this … he wrote “Southeastern,” one of my favorite records of all time, after sobering up. And from that point on every record he made was to die for. And that had a lot to do with it. I did a Belting Bronco [recording session] with him recently, and he told me a lot about 15 years of sobriety and stuff. And it really changed my opinion on everything. I didn’t know that you could learn lessons at this age.

Zach Bryan also spoke extensively on how his life has changed since getting sober, and how speculative and worried he was about it before the decision. Since his career exploded and he wrote all his hits while drinking, he thought all that might go away if he stopped.

I’m not the sober type either bro, I hate that stuff. I always thought sobriety was a joke because it’s people that couldn’t control themselves celebrating not being able to control themselves. When I was drinking a lot, I always thought, ‘Why can’t you control yourself?’ I never realized I had a problem. When I was sobering up and I started drinking fake beers and stuff, I was like, ‘Man this sucks. This is not what Hemingway or Kerouac would have done.’ But then as more time went on, I started to realize what that was.

The comments come in contrast to Zach Top’s statements on the matter from earlier in the year when he said, “Sobriety is such a fad, trendy thing right now. The next person I hear say they got sober, I want to hit them in the head. We don’t need that. Just be a normal guy and drink a normal amount. You can do it your whole life. You’re fine.”

But clearly, some are not. It really depends on the individual.

What Zach Bryan’s thought process proves—and who he found inspiration through with Evan Felker and Jason Isbell—is that the old comments section line, “They were better before they got sober” is not always true. Time will tell how true or not it is for Zach Bryan.

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