Zach Bryan Tells Bruce Springsteen He Doesn’t Want to Be Considered ‘A Country Musician’

Last year, Zach Bryan saw two of his songs spend weeks atop Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart, including the 20-week chart-topper “I Remember Everything” with Kacey Musgraves and the six-week No. 1 “Something in the Orange” (which also reached the top 20 on the Country Airplay chart). Earlier this year, he also won his first Grammy, in the best country duo/group performance category for the Musgraves collaboration.

But during a recent interview with one of his musical heroes, Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Bruce Springsteen, Bryan opened up about why he doesn’t want to be considered “a country musician.”

“Everyone calls me it,” Bryan told Springsteen as part of Rolling Stone‘s Musicians on Musicians series. “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.”

Springsteen said that Bryan has been “connected to the country genre,” but also noted that after attending one of Bryan’s shows, he saw “so much — and I don’t want to call it rock — 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 responded. “When I first started making music, I told Stefan and Danny, my managers, 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.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Bryan opened up about his own battle with imposter syndrome. Springsteen asked Bryan when he first considered himself “a serious songwriter.”

“I still don’t!” Bryan responded, saying, “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, it’s just I never in a million years thought I would be sitting here with you. 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 Dylan song or a Springsteen song or anything like that.'”

Springsteen also spoke candidly of his own feelings about songwriting, saying, “Songwriting’s hard. And I don’t think I felt really comfortable with the idea that I was writing good songs till I was about 22 or 23, when I was coming up with the songs for my first record, a record called Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., which came out in 1973.”

Springsteen also complimented several of Bryan’s songs, particularly “Revival” and “Open the Gate,” noting that they are “songs you’re gonna be singing till you are as old as me.”

Springsteen released his latest album, Only the Strong Survive, in 2022, while Bryan released his latest project, The Great American Bar Scene, in July.