Zach Bryan Doesn’t Need to Play It So Safe

In October, Oklahoma country music stadium draw Zach Bryan garnered attention at the highest levels of government when he posted a snippet of a track called “Bad News” in which he sings “ICE is gonna come bust down your door.” By the end of the week, United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem rebuked him on conservative personality Benny Johnson’s The Benny Show: “I hope he understands how completely disrespectful that song is, not just to law enforcement but to this country. To every single individual that has ever stood up and fought for our freedoms, he just compromised it all by putting out a product such as that.” Bryan, who was a Navy ordnanceman until his songwriting introduced a new career path, hadn’t anticipated backlash; fans brimmed with excitement for a full release. As his plaintive half-verse lamenting the “fading of the red, white, and blue” shot up the American-media flagpole, he stressed that he holds no partisan affiliations and writes about feeling trapped in a tug-of-war: “To see how much shit it stirred up makes me not only embarrassed but kind of scared. Left wing or right wing, we’re all one bird and American. To be clear, I’m on neither of these radical sides,” he said on Instagram. It was a call back to country music’s mid-2010s togetherness initiative, home to horrors like Brad Paisley and LL Cool J’s “Accidental Racist” and aw-shucks appeals to look past our differences at shows.

Bryan’s not bullshitting. It’s true that “Bad News” and its author are painstakingly, almost characteristically avoidant of even the appearance of taking a political side. Bryan can be terse in his scant interviews and is no stranger to temporarily excusing himself from social media for a too-declarative statement. In 2024, he took a time-out and apologized for announcing during a rager that he prefers Ye to Taylor Swift. His new album, With Heaven on Top, which features the actually not-that-controversial song, catalogues his trip from alcohol abuse and a breakup to sobriety and a new marriage. “Bad News” documents a struggle to find footing in dizzyingly strange times with a shrinking support system. Eroding consensus overhead is the wallpaper in a room where he misses someone. The vibe is considerably less These deportations are out of control and more The country is so divided I can’t even talk to my girl.

When Bryan writes about a struggle that could be construed as political, denouncing people trying to “build an empire off the things that they can take” in American Heartbreak’s “Cold Damn Vampires” or cataloguing the plights of gamblers and barflies in the title track of The Great American Bar Scene, he doesn’t sell a specific why. To live is to struggle; he often writes of dreaming of a harder, simpler life on “The Outskirts” or as a “Tradesman.” He doesn’t — like Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen, both seemingly referenced in the lyrics of “Bad News” — want you to ponder a villain, the way “This Land Is Your Land” and “Born in the USA” indict a nation’s failure to deliver on its promises in the ’40s and ’80s. Bryan, instead, lays out an implicitly centrist reading months ahead of a full lyric sheet.

With Heaven on Top’s rollout was supposed to be about making a break from the infamy of Bryan’s year or so of concerning headlines about allegations of emotional abuse from his Barstoolite ex Brianna Chickenfry, his mysterious black eye, and his squabbles on-camera in a bar and at a music festival. The album largely doesn’t engage with politics but periodically showcases awareness while pondering his troubles; “DeAnn’s Denim,” a song musing on hereditary alcoholism, brandishes a jeans/genes conceit like the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad, and the title track complains about “greedy politician boys” in a rat race. But the story throughout With Heaven on Top is that Zach Bryan is painstakingly cleaning up his life. (“Six beers a week ain’t bad, just boring is all,” he sings in the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers descendant “Slicked Back.”)

The notion that “Bad News” is trying to pick a fight with the United States government in the middle of such a push doesn’t square with Bryan’s historic reticence to be seen as leaning left or right or with his Super Bowl photo op with the president. But you can’t dictate how people engage with a song; you can express intentions as a writer but can’t know what meaning will be piled on by a text’s interactions with a world of personal and shared experience. Letting “Bad News” hit with the rest of the album, after the Noem flap blew over, slotted it in a week of upheaval about ICE and Customs and Border Patrol violence. Renee Good was shot to death in Minnesota; two people were injured in Portland. Bryan’s lines about cops as “cocky motherfuckers,” ICE as door busters, and a country leaving kids “all scared and all alone” might not enjoy the careful bothsidesism he seeks. But to his credit, this state of affairs is indeed a bipartisan project, nurtured by all sorts of political actors prior to the industrialized deportations of the past year. But Bryan lacks the delicacy to thread this needle. His project is making the personal feel universal; he doesn’t ache to write anything half of America might not relate to.

This is an unnecessary evasiveness in the mid-2020s when everyone from Beyoncé to proud MAGA musicians occupy space on the same charts. The buzz around ostensibly or implicitly anti-fascist songs and videos from singer-songwriters Jesse Welles and Bryan Andrews, as well as the continued prosperity of Americafest guest Jason Aldean and the 2025 inauguration performer and American Idol judge Carrie Underwood, say the demographically vast audience for country music loves blistering, honest populism no matter the orientation. Bryan would be hailed as a hero by people who listen to one country album a year and on late-night and cable-news circuits if he aimed “Bad News” squarely at the current DHS. The fact that he refuses to points to a reality in which he isn’t performing obstinance for conservative industry cranks (who don’t even play him on the radio anyhow) and simply believes everyone else is a radical, and that’s what’s ruining the country now. But whether or not this idea circulates and lets the air out of the anti-administration protest potential of “Bad News,” as Bryan might like, is up to time and circumstance.