This week on the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, two great American songwriters -- 'The Boss' Bruce Springsteen and the already iconic Zach Bryan -- get together in New Jersey to go deep on songwriting secrets and much more.
LISTEN: Rolling Stone Music Now | Bruce Springsteen Meets Zach Bryan
Kicking off this year's Musicians On Musicians series, Bruce Springsteen is joined by Zazh Bryan in his New Jersey farmhouse studio following their first meeting just a few weeks prior at rehearsals in New York City -- after which Springsteen flew across the country to join Bryan at his own stadium show.
"I just never in a million years thought I would be sitting here with you," Bryan humbly tells Springsteen, as he sports the lyrics "Deliver me from nowhere" from Bruce's "State Trooper" on his arm.
"You started playing when you were 14. That’s young, if I’m right," Spingsteen asks, and Bryan responds with an affirmative "yes sir," certainly a muscle memory from his time served in the U.S. Navy. "I’m very curious about how your time in the Navy affected your songwriting, and when you started to consider yourself a serious songwriter," Bruce adds.
"I still don’t," Bryan says. "To this day I have really bad impostor syndrome. But I had a lot of friends in the Navy, and we’d go out to the bars and we’d always have these times, and I’d go back to my barracks room and I’d sing about it. I never had anything else to express myself. You work so much you never really have time to talk about these things. So I’d go home and I would write, and I never in a million years thought I would become a songwriter because I never thought I had the talent. And that’s not a humble thing," Zach explains. "Because we would hear your songs, and they’re beautiful and poetic and genius. When I play [my songs], I’m like, 'There’s no way people enjoy these like they would enjoy a [Bob] Dylan song or a Springsteen song or anything like that.'"
“What’s mind-boggling,” to Bruce, he tells Zach, is his quick rise from Bryan’s first public performance in 2019, to selling out arenas today. “This is crazy!” he adds. “To us too!,” says Zach, "’cause the guys in my band are the same dudes I went to high school with. So when we see the tour, we’re like, ‘What happened?’” The way Bryan sees it, he’s been throwing tons of random music “at a fan” with the hopes that something will finally stick.
Springsteen disagrees. “It’s just not reading like that, man,” he contends. “You got ‘Open the Gate,’ got that ‘Revival’ -- those are songs you’re gonna be singing 'til you’re old as me,” Bruce says.
With longevity in mind, Zach wonders how, “after being Bruce Springsteen all these years,” he has managed to keep his love for music intact. “Music is not hard to love,” Bruce explains. “You gotta contextualize and keep the rest of the things that come with it in the right perspective. That’s the key. Which is really, it’s an idea of yourself, your possibilities, your capabilities, the kind of joy you can bring into the world if you can, and that you can give to people. Music is powerful, man. Poetry is powerful.”
Also during their lengthy chat, Bryan discussed his status as “a Country musician,” and his attempts to get beyond that simple description of his musical style. “Everyone calls me it,” Zach says. “I want to be a songwriter, and you’re quintessentially a songwriter. No one calls Bruce Springsteen -- hate to use your name in front of you -- but no one calls Bruce Springsteen a freaking Rock musician, which you are one, but you’re also an Indie musician, you’re also a Country musician. You’re all these things encapsulated in one man. And that’s what songwriting is.”
Though undoubtedly “connected to the Country genre,” Springsteen says he witnessed so much more in Zach's live performance. “I don’t want to call it Rock,” Bruce explains, “just energy in your performance. You bust all those different genre boundaries down.”
"That’s why you’re a hero to me, because no one’s ever come up to you and said you were in any sort of lane,” Bryan adds. “When I first started making music... I was like, ‘I want to be in a lane where, when people look back, they can listen to my music and it’s supremely whatever 'you' were doing.’ You were the only person in my head that has ever done that.”
Listen to the full Musicians on Musicians episode with Bruce Springsteen and Zach Bryan above -- plus follow along with Rolling Stone Music Now on the free Audacy app for the biggest stories in music, hosted by Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hiatt, featuring interviews with top artists, expert insight on new releases and breaking news from the Rolling Stone staff, and much more.