Two great American songwriters go deep on the perils of stardom, classic country, the importance of mums, and the troubled state of the union

Not for the first time today, Zach Bryan is making his new friend laugh. Bryan is trying to arrange himself on a plush white studio couch for a filmed conversation, and it’s making him self-conscious. “Do I look pompous with my legs crossed?” he asks.

The guy next to him, Bruce Springsteen, who owns the couch, the studio, and the entire Colts Neck, New Jersey, farm surrounding it, cracks up as he chimes in: “What’s the level of my pomposity on this?”

Bryan spent his childhood on a Navy base in Okinawa, Japan, and then in Oklahoma, worlds away from New Jersey’s Monmouth County. He was all of six years old when The Rising came out. Still, Springsteen is one of his biggest heroes — he has a lyric from the Nebraska track “State Trooper” (“Deliver me from nowhere”) tattooed on his left bicep. Springsteen, in turn, has become a huge fan of Bryan, whose finely crafted, roots-inflected tales of American life owe more than a little to the older man’s songwriting. On Bryan’s first two albums, he’s backed mostly by acoustic guitar and harmonica, following the Nebraska template.

Springsteen admires the precision, energy, and intelligence of Bryan’s songwriting, but he’s also clearly charmed by the 28-year-old Navy veteran’s obvious hero worship, puppy-in-a-frat energy, and relentless sincerity. They met for the first time just a few weeks earlier, at rehearsals in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center — after Rolling Stone played matchmaker, Springsteen ended up flying cross-country mid-tour to join Bryan onstage. (Springsteen’s own tour with the E Street Band is chronicled in a new documentary, Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.)

Springsteen played his first stadium gigs 12 years into his recording career; five years into his own, Bryan is already there. Since his 2019 debut, DeAnn, named after his late mum, Bryan has managed to release more than 100 songs, and he’s understandably still unnerved by the speed with which his life has changed. Similar to Springsteen, he makes music that feels like the work of a cult hero who’s somehow broken out to the masses. As he sits down with Springsteen, it’s late April, and what will become his latest hit album, The Great American Bar Scene (with another nod to Nebraska in the title track’s lyrics), is still a work in progress.

In fact, he’s recording some of it this very day. After they wrap up their conversation, the two artists head next door to lay down Springsteen’s vocals for the extraordinary track “Sandpaper”, which they debuted onstage in Brooklyn. The song ends up sounding like a conversation between an older man and his past self, with Springsteen bringing the full weight of his years to melancholic, imagery-drenched lyrics he could well have written.

Springsteen: You started playing when you were 14. That’s young, if I’m right.

Bryan: Fourteen, yes, sir.

Springsteen: And you enlisted in the Navy at 17. I’m very curious about how your time in the Navy affected your songwriting, and when you started to consider yourself a serious songwriter.

Bryan: I still don’t! 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.”

Your creative aspirations and inspirations, did they change as you got older? Or do you still have the same goal you used to?

Springsteen: Same goal as from when I was 15 to now. So that’s 60 years. And it’s basically, “Hey, we come out onstage at night, we give everything we have. This is the last night we may play. This is the last audience we may see.” Been doing that for 60 years. 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.

Now, let me get this straight. You didn’t do your first public performance till 2019?

Bryan: This is funny because when I was in the Navy… there’s a Potbelly subs. It’s like a franchise sub place. They call me and they’re like, “You should come play all day, for nine hours.” So I remember playing that nine hours. I was just playing covers. And they gave me a $60 cheque. I got it, and I was like, “Oh, I’m a professional musician now.”

Springsteen: What’s mind-boggling is if your first public performance was like 2019, and [now] you are selling out [arenas] and you have some stadium gigs coming. This is crazy!

Bryan: To us too! ’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?” When it comes to your music, it’s “Oh, he wrote ‘Born to Run’. That’s what happened. He wrote ‘Dancing in the Dark’, like, that’s what’s going on with Bruce Springsteen.” With us, it’s like all these random songs that we just threw at a fan.

Springsteen: It’s just not reading like that, man. You got “Open the Gate”, got that “Revival” — those are songs you’re gonna be singing till you’re old as me, you know?

Bryan: How have you stayed in love with music after being Bruce Springsteen all these years?

Springsteen: Music is not hard to love. You gotta contextualise and keep the rest of the things that come with it in the right perspective.

Bryan: The small group of people who you played to, who you thought you were going to play to your whole life, did you keep them in your heart the entire time up to right now?

Credit: Danny Clinch

Springsteen: 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.

Bryan: I’ve learned that on my journey. I didn’t know how powerful it was until I started. There was a quote somewhere about the writing on Nebraska that really resonated with me a lot: “I know with Nebraska, I was interested in making myself as invisible as possible.” That’s my favourite record ever written.

Springsteen: Nebraska happened as an accident. I was just trying to save money in the studio. I had the biggest success I’d ever had in 1981. We had a hit single, “Hungry Heart.” But I was already wondering — there’s an element of what we do that can feel hazardous to your inner life. My idea was “I’m gonna take this a little slower, I’m gonna slow this down a little bit.”

Bryan: I’m in the exact place right now in my writing and career. I’m like, “Oh, wow, I really came out of the gate fast.”

Springsteen: You did.

Bryan: I’ve really risen fast. But now, at this point, I can’t even catch my own back wind. Not in a bad way, either. It just feels like I put so much music out, people have read into it so much; but in reality, I was just writing music, and now I gotta slow down and home in.

Springsteen: You gotta listen to your inner voice — that’s really important. When Nebraska came along, initially it was just like, “I just want to put some songs down, so I’m not spending all my money in the studio.” The strange thing is, I was making Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. at the exact same time. I’ve got the cut “Born in the U.S.A.” I know this thing is lightning in a bottle. And then I have my demos from Nebraska, and I’m really drawn…

Bryan: To the murder, to the serial-killer murderer!

Springsteen: Exactly.

Bryan: Did you feel as dark in your life at that point as those songs sounded? Or were you more happy about how dark those songs sounded because you were a songwriter?

Springsteen: If I look at what happened to me in the year or so after I wrote the record, I was going through some stuff that I didn’t even know I’d be going through. I’ve had to wrestle with depression in my life. And I’ve got my drugs I take that keep me sane, but at that time, I didn’t have any of those things. And it was really when I hit a wall at a certain moment, personally. I always think your records are premonitions of what’s going to be coming up in your consciousness, and you’re coming up out of your subconsciousness in the immediate aftermath of what you created.

Bryan: When it comes to Born in the U.S.A. and Nebraska, those two things are perceived like they came from two different songwriters. It’s so crazy.

Springsteen: I was feeling that conflict myself, of being two different people.

Bryan: But that makes you good at it, is what’s hilarious.

Springsteen: It gives your work a breadth that is unusual. It was unusual to go from a record like Nebraska and then Born in the U.S.A., which I knew was going to be a popular record, but I had no idea it was going to be what it was.

Bryan: To this day, we have this bit, me and my band, where we’ll go into a bar — there’s TouchTunes now, right? We’ll go in, and we’ll put “Born in the U.S.A.” on repeat 200 times. And we’ll see who leaves. The people who stay around, we’ll hang out with them.

Springsteen: This is crazy, my man.

Bryan: The Nebraska movie that’s coming out, are you part of it? Are you excited about it?

Springsteen: I’ve seen the scripts and I’ve talked to the director. They’re just putting it all together, so I don’t have an awful lot to say about it, but I’m excited about it happening. It’ll be an interesting story.

Bryan: That’s gotta come as such a shock, if you’re just a guy, and they’re like, “Hey, we’re gonna make a movie about what you did at some point in your life.”

Springsteen: Yeah, it’s an interesting story, and the script is really good. I feel good about the whole project.

Bryan: Me and the guys [in my band] are geeked, too. It’s all we talked about for two weeks.

Springsteen: The band is really good. So I was curious where your band came from.

Credit: Danny Clinch

Bryan: So we have the same story, essentially the hometown thing. It was a really hard process getting out of the Navy. I didn’t even want to get out. But I get home and I call all my best friends from high school who had put all their instruments down, and I’m like, “Hey, guys, I need a band, and I don’t trust anybody. I trust you guys. You guys can barely play a few instruments.” One of my best friends quit his job as a teacher. Another quit his job as a metal technician.

We got in my truck and drove to the Iowa State Fair and played our first show. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. Because we didn’t even rehearse. We’re just like, “Let’s do this.” And my fiddle player, I tweeted out one day, in all caps, I go, “I need a fiddle player.” I’m sure that’s not how you got your band members — tweeting, right?

Springsteen: I put an ad in the newspaper! The interesting thing that you said is that you needed people you could trust. More than you needed somebody who was a professional. That was the same thing. My guys all came out of Asbury Park. It was the guys I’d known for years. They were people I felt comfortable around. They were people who I knew I could be myself around. And they were people who I knew would keep me being myself and wouldn’t let me get away with it.

Bryan: My boys call me out all the time.

Springsteen: How deep into your new record are you?

Bryan: There’s 14 songs, but I’m not sure how I wanna record a lot of ’em. You have a lot to do with it. Other musicians have a lot to do with it. I’m like, “How did they do this?” This is the first time in my life where I’ve given myself time not to know, where I’m really thinking about it.

Springsteen: Where have you been recording the new stuff?

Bryan: That’s what’s funny. Some of them are on my phone and some of them are at Electric Lady. And some of them are full productions here, and some of them are [recorded in] fields.

Springsteen: Everything you’re doing so far is right.

Bryan: Hopefully it stays that way. When it came to “I’m on Fire” — the synth, did that come first or was it what you’re missing after?

Credit: Danny Clinch

Springsteen: That was literally a song I wrote in two minutes. Didn’t even think about it. Didn’t think it was ever going to be on a record. And in the studio, there’s me playing that Johnny Cash Tennessee Three guitar. And then there’s the synthesiser, and there’s Max [Weinberg] playing a bass foot. I think that’s all that’s on that record. There’s nothing on that record. Wrote it in two minutes. And if you go to iTunes now, it’s the number-one favourite song out of every song I’ve written. I wrote that in two minutes!

Bryan: That’s what’s crazy about songs. You never know. People will just like what they like.

Springsteen: Do you take a long time to write? Because the songs are very detailed. Do you edit out verses?

Bryan: Probably the same as you. Do you go back and forth between both?

Springsteen: I do.

Bryan: Me too. Yeah. Sometimes I’ll write a song in two minutes and it’s “Oh, this is going to be great.” And then I’ll write a song in three months.

Springsteen: Oh, you will?

Bryan: And then I’ll throw it away.

Springsteen: Yeah, that’s just the way it is. That’s amazing. I have so many good Zach Bryan lines here that we should get into. “Oklahoman Son”: I love that song. “You can’t hide where you’re from/With night-crawler blood on your castin’ thumb/You can fight and fiend and sell your guns/But you’ll always be the Oklahoman son” [pauses]. That’s good! That kind of detail, that night-crawler blood. Where did that come from?

Bryan: Do you ever think Asbury Park is a small town?

Springsteen: Yeah, I do.

Bryan: Do you ever feel like no matter where you go, like you were saying earlier, you’re always gonna have that in your heart and your soul? I felt like that last year at a point. My grandfather used to take me fishing, and my father used to take me fishing, and we all grew up really kinda — not poor, but not middle class, either. And I wanted to go home so bad after being in New York and Philly for years. I was like, “I gotta go back to Oklahoma.” And I went, and some stuff happened when I got there, and I was like, “Ah, never mind.”

But there’s something really beautiful about Oklahoma, like in the summertime and the green grass. Same as out here, probably. When you grow up somewhere, you become accustomed to the way the dirt smells and the way it smells when you mow your grass. I’d missed that for a long time. That’s what “Oklahoman Son” is about.

Springsteen: Once again, the level of detail and the maturity in your writing is just amazing.

Bryan: In “Used Cars”, you were talking about your mom, she’s fingering her wedding band. That’s where I get stuff like that, is lines from men like yourself. Is that real? Did that really happen? Do you remember being a kid and looking at your mom like kind of messing with her finger?

Springsteen: Where that came from is we always had used cars. We never had a new car. So I always remember the trips to the used-car dealer, and so some of the detail just came out of being a writer. The touching of the ring, that’s just writing.

Bryan: It’s hard to explain that to people sometimes, when they ask where you came up with something like that.

Springsteen: Hey, you’re a writer. That’s how it happens, that’s how you process information. That kind of writing for me started when I wrote a song called “The River”. It was the first song where I wrote in kind of character, with a lot of detail, and after that I said, “I really like writing like this.” On Nebraska, I ended up writing all those detail-filled songs.

RS: It’s connected to the country-music songwriting tradition for both of you. Bruce, you’ve said in the past that “The River” came directly from listening to Hank Williams’ music.

Springsteen: When I was about Zach’s age, I started to listen to country music: Hank Williams, a lot of Johnny Cash. Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, the song “Wreck on the Highway” from that record, and then Nebraska were a result of me finally processing my country influences in a way that I felt comfortable with.

Bryan: That’s where I’m at in my own career right now. I love country music, but I also love an assortment of stuff — Kings of Leon, Jason Isbell, all those guys.

Springsteen: You can do whatever you want, man. You’re in the right place.

Bryan: That’s insane to hear from you… When I listen to your music — I’m not insulting your genre — but when I listen to your music, I’m like, “If you put different production to this, it’s a country song.”

Springsteen: Right. There’s a lot of country in it.

Bryan: That’s why I don’t want to be a country musician.

Springsteen: That’s fascinating.

Credit: Danny Clinch

Bryan: I don’t want to be a country musician. Everyone calls me it. 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: No, it’s interesting. ’Cause I know that you’ve been connected to the country genre, which I can hear, but if you go and see the show, there’s so much — and I don’t want to call it rock — just energy in your performance. You bust all those different genre boundaries down.

Bryan: 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. 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.

Springsteen: You’re carving your own space out. You’re not going to get locked into one genre or another genre.

Bryan: Were you ever locked in a genre when you first started? When you first went to Columbia, were they like, “Oh, this is a rock musician”?

Springsteen: Well, I got signed because I was a singer-songwriter. They didn’t even know I had a band… James Taylor, John Prine, Loudon Wainwright, Jackson Browne. The singer-songwriter was huge in 1972. I got signed to be one of those guys.

Bryan: I love all of those guys. But did you ever feel a little bit of resentment when you started becoming the, like, guy? Was there a moment where people were like, “Screw this guy”?

Springsteen: Whenever you have that level of success, you see everything. “He’s great.” “Screw this guy.” You see it all. That’s just part of the job description; you got to live with that. I always say, “Hey, I get to do what I want and then people get to say what they want about it.” That’s my job.

Bryan: That’s beautiful advice, man.

RS: Zach, are you feeling that “Fuck that guy” energy out there? Is that why you asked?

Bryan: No. Honestly. Now I don’t. I used to, like a year or two years ago. I was really in my own head. I’m, like, I’m less angry with the world now. I never really understood what I was mad at. I always had that chip on my shoulder. People would be like, “What’s your deal?” Because I thought everyone was out to get something from me.

Springsteen: You’ve got good people around you. And the way that you’re making your choices is important as far as self-preservation goes, and setting the right sort of environment for you to do your work in. You’ve made good choices.

Bryan: How much was “My Hometown” and [those types of songs] derived from your dad, and how much was it derived from paying attention to the people around you? Did you ever combine the two?

Springsteen: All the time. I mean, you use everything you’ve seen. My dad, he was troubled and really hardscrabble blue-collar. For me as a son, there was something about his pain that I felt I needed to communicate. I wrote so many songs coming from that place. That’s where the body of my work really comes out of: a feeling I had for my father’s life and my mother’s.

Bryan: That’s why I released DeAnn; it’s for my mom. She had passed away. I was like, “How do I keep her name alive?” I thought songs would keep her name alive forever. Which was cool. So when you said that, that’s beautiful. The way you just put that is something I’ve always searched for.

RS: Bruce once said, introducing a song that he wrote about his mum called “The Wish”, that there were not a lot of people in rock and country and rap who were brave enough to write a song about their mums. But you, Zach, have written many of them.

Bryan: Yeah, because moms make the world go ’round. Period. I don’t care how old you are. Like, are you serious? Mothers are the best thing that’s ever happened to the world. They are just as strong as the dudes, and 10 times as smart.

Springsteen: That’s exactly right.

Bryan: Dude, if you can’t commend that, you’re a coward. You’re a weirdo.

Springsteen: My mother was the strength of our house.

Bryan: Mothers are the strength of every house. Period. And they always will be. And it’s, if our moms didn’t exist, none of us would. I love singing songs about my mom. If it wasn’t for who she was, I wouldn’t be who I was. Same with your father probably, writing all those songs about him. You’re like, “Oh, if I sing this about him, it feels like he might be around.”

Springsteen: It was a way that centred our relationship. He heard things we couldn’t talk about, but I could write about in a song. And then, amazingly enough, I remember I said, “Hey, Pops, what’s your favourite song?” “The ones about me.” That’s what he told me.

RS: There is so much pessimism and division in the US right now. I’m wondering, as two great American songwriters, if there is any degree of optimism from the two of you about the chances of us overcoming all of that.

Springsteen: Big question. I don’t know. My take on it is it’s bad, but it’s going to get better. I will sit here and I will predict again, Donald Trump will not be the next president of the United States. Of course, I went all across Europe saying that the last time, and I was wrong. It’s hard to read because sometimes I think, “Gee, I led my life a certain way. It rolled out a certain way, and maybe that has something to do with why I remain hopeful.” And I just think that generationally, I still feel hopeful. I think we’re going to get past the degree of division that’s in the country right now, and move on to something else —

Bryan: Gratitude, maybe?

Springsteen: I have absolutely nothing brilliant to say about this, so I’m bailing.

Bryan: So, I’m 28. I don’t have that much experience. I’m neither one way or the other. I served my country for eight, nine years. I think America ebbs and flows, and it always has. Always will. I’m tired of everyone arguing. It’s about time people were just thankful to be American. ’Cause personally, I’m so grateful I get to wake up in a country that’s free. It’s really special to be in a country where there’s so many different people and so many different parties and so many people that have an opportunity to come together and be kind to each other and respect each other’s backgrounds. There’s people that have died defending our rights. Men and women have died for these things, and we just are, like, pissed about what?

Springsteen: Yeah.

Bryan: Being free enough to say everything we feel? It’s weird. It’s strange. It blows my mind all the time. And I’m just thankful.

Springsteen: That’s as political as we’re gonna get!

Springsteen invited Rolling Stone to his Colts Neck, New Jersey, farm, where Rolling Stone shot inside his Thrill Hill Recording studio and in a century-old barn that was also seen in his 2019 Western Stars documentary. 

The December 2024-February 2025 issue of Rolling Stone AU/NZ hits newsstands from Thursday, December 12th. 

Whether you’re a fan of music, you’re a supporter of the local music scene, or you enjoy the thrill of print and longform journalism, then Rolling Stone AU/NZ is exactly what you need. Click the link below for more information regarding a magazine subscription.