Zac Brown Band’s Next Album Will Be Personal and Genre-less
Zac Brown Band's next album will be more of what moves them — and you may not be able to slap a country music label on it.
Speaking to Billboard recently, Brown spills that, "There's some really personal songs on the record," which is still yet-to-be titled. It's also going to be exploratory.
"There's some songs that are so personal and so real that some of them I couldn't even imagine having to play six months ago when we were writing them," the star continues. "There's some songs that we wrote and perform that still just tear me up."
Brown and his wife separated in 2018 after 12 years of marriage and five kids together, but it's not clear if the split influenced new songs he put together for this project. When asked how to classify the new album, the band agree that they'd rather not put it in a box. "I'd rather not have a label at all," the frontman says.
"This is going to be a really good exploratory record — there's a lot of rhythmic elements added to what we would normally play onstage, and then there’s going to be stuff that's really stripped-down and real," he furthers. "It'll be a good mixture of everything." The album has pop producers attached to it, and Brown admits their influence will be clear, and that this release will diverse, like previous albums in recent years that deviated from their debut — the more clearly country The Foundation.
Zac Brown Band will soon take new music on the road for the recently-announced the Owl Tour, which starts May 25 in Indianapolis. The tour name was of course inspired by the bird, and everything being used to promote it is owl-themed — a promo image even shows Brown holding an owl.
"Owls are one of the mythical kind of creatures — we even had one at a photo shoot, and just being next to one and seeing one, they just seem otherworldly to me," he explains to Billboard. "They're just like a magical thing, symbolizing wisdom and foreshadowing. But I have kind of a kinship to them. I don't know what it is, I'm just really drawn to them."
"I've got three owls tattooed on me, actually," he reveals. The album will pull this theme in, as well.
Of the tour, Brown promises top-notch production — something fans have grown to expect and love from the group's live show. The video content, especially, will be a unique experience, or as the singer says, "You won’t feel like you saw the same thing."
An unexpected addition to their live concert? A nod to ZBB's CMT Crossroads collaboration with pop's Shawn Mendes, likely that his song "In My Blood" will make their setlist.
"There was a certain kind of energy where we connected, his band and our band, but I sat down and listened to that recording and I had this idea: What if we were to take that tune and do it the way we do it? It connects with a younger generation, but we still are doing our thing to it," Brown says. "I think it could be a massively gigantic pop-rock song, because it has that pop sensibility but we just crank up the nitros on it and catch it on fire. It could be really cool."
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