“I’m assuming this record is just like all the other ones and there’s gonna be a billion people saying it’s over produced and shitty,” the country singer-songwriter said of recording stripped-back version
Only three days after Zach Bryan released his sixth studio album, With Heaven on Top, the country singer-songwriter dropped a full acoustic version of the album — much to his own disdain, it seems.
“I’m assuming this record is just like all the other ones and there’s gonna be a billion people saying it’s over produced and shitty so I sat down in a room by myself and recorded all the songs acoustically,” Bryan wrote in an Instagram post. “There’s mistakes and I didn’t redo any of them.”
Released Monday at midnight, the acoustic version contains 24 stripped-down tracks, as well as the full album, making it a whopping 49 tracks in total.
Bryan said he recorded the reflective songs over the past winter, the U.S. Navy veteran and his team bouncing between three different houses in his home state of Oklahoma to record the album. “The last ten years I’ve tried my best to share the human experience,” Bryan explained in a second post. “I feel like I’ve lived all my 20’s out on a very large, very lucky and very unfair stage but this one felt different. This one felt like recording music with my best friends again.”
The alternate cover, a mustached man with what appears to be a colorful lei necklace around his neck, was taken from a painting from one of the houses where Bryan recorded all the songs for the album.
The country star’s With Heaven On Tour will hit the road in St. Louis, Missouri, on March 7, with Dijon, Kings of Leon, Alabama Shakes, Ben Howard, MJ Lenderman, and others accompanying him across tour stops in the United States and Europe.
