I nearly nominated this earlier in the tournament, but it's a song that quickly lost its luster for me. I haven't been able to make it more than halfway through American Heartbreak yet. 34 songs on an album is ridiculous. Even the greatest artists of all-time are going to have a lot of chaff with that much material at once. Maybe if he'd released a normal 10-12 song album, the hype around him would feel more justified. People are acting like a great new country artist has exploded onto the scene, but I'm not hearing it. His lyricism is his strongest point, but almost every song sounds the same, which quickly grows dull when trying to get through the album. His voice isn't bad, but doesn't offer much range besides the occasional brief grit he adds to punctuate emotion. I think it's great that he's finding so much critical and commercial success, but I'm pretty underwhelmed so far.
As far as
American Heartbreak goes, it seems like his weakest release thus far, but I haven't even tried to go from start to finish on it. I can't think of a single artist that I want to listen to a 34 song album from at this point in my life, at least not from start to finish. I might make myself do it at some point as some sort of test of endurance, but I'm just too old for all that right now. I have cherry-picked a few songs from the album that have either received praise or just sounded interesting and nothing has been outright bad that I've listened to, but the new production isn't something that I necessarily wanted from him, but even his previous albums didn't have the some organic feel of his youtube videos, and this album seems even further from that. Now it could still grow on me the way
Deann did, but my favorite Zach stuff is him sitting outside somewhere with a guitar pouring his heart out.
I will say that the best thing about Zach is that he exists because of the internet, which have allowed his fans to have a more intimate connection to him. Sure, as far as I know, doesn't really communicate with his fans directly very often (I don't follow him on his socials, but I don't hear/see much about this, I could be very wrong), but I think his stardom coming from releasing videos instead of the traditional rise to stardom coming from singles/albums plays into that. Can see his expression and his eyes and the veins on his neck bulging and all that good stuff.
I like a lot of the stuff I see from him, but I'm not obsessed. I think he very well could end up being one of the most important country music figures from this era, because he may be the first person (or one of the first) to do it the way he did it. I'm going to keep an eye out on him, but I certainly don't fault anyone for him not being their cup of tea.
His song "If She Wants a Cowboy", which I almost nominated, reminded me of Adam Page though.