No man ever steps in the same river twice, the philosopher Heraclitus said, and each time a person crisscrosses America, both the individual and America have changed. The new album With Heaven on Top is a snapshot of movement; Zach Bryan taking stock of how far he’s traveled even as the ground shifts beneath his feet.
At an expansive 80 minutes, With Heaven on Top unfolds as a musical odyssey: from Kansas City to Chicago, Colorado to California, bull-riding in Oklahoma to running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Sometimes Bryan’s nervous mind leaps between locations in a single breath. In “Skin,” he sings, “Are you walking ’round Tribeca with him?/ Can you still feel that Wisconsin wind from that late October?” His mind stays restless, even on the rare occasions that his body holds still.
Bryan first introduces these themes with a poem in opener “Down, Down, Stream.” Here a New York man “told me everything had gone down, down stream from him/ Like that cold water of his life had gone up his back, down his front, and around his legs/ And before he could drink any of it, it’d already passed him by.” There’s an undercurrent of fear in With Heaven on Top: a hoarding of memories, the anxiety that exes and friends and even old dogs could soon be forgotten.
Related Video
Does that sound dark? Because With Heaven on Top is an album made for the light, full of sunny drives through the desert and cozy nighttime fires. The darkness creeps in through the lyrics, like shadows cast by big, beautiful chords.
“Appetite” finds Bryan bombing on stage in “Northwest Arkansas/ Playing shows to those who don’t care at all.” It’s a long way from “my band playin’ sweet notes in front of a hundred thousand people,” as happened in real life in September, as well as in the first track, “Down, Down, Stream.” But the chorus of “Appetite” soars on clouds of joy and fiddle strings.
“Appetite” also grapples with Bryan’s tendency to ruminate. He wonders “why am I always thinking/ ‘Bout things that really matter, like twin towers and satellites?” He considers whether or not he should have kids, singing, “What if I don’t want children/ To grow up like their father? Willing/ To stir shit up and start a fight/ Give themself up an appetite.” Here “Appetite” is more than hunger or ambition. It’s restlessness, a reason to keep wandering.
If there’s an issue regarding With Heaven on Top, it’s that Bryan’s music doesn’t travel as far as he does. On “Aeroplane,” he vows, “I’m sayin’ goodbye to who I used to be/ I’ll start a forest fire with my family tree.” But a track like “DeAnn’s Denim,” about his late mother, wouldn’t sound out of place on 2019’s DeAnn. The person he used to be is still here, and so is his family tree; the past is present.
Like his antecedent, Neil Young, Bryan’s songs can seem to run together at first, and variety might only reveal itself after a couple of listens. But despite all of that, his musicality (and band) continue to evolve. Compared even to his last album, 2024’s The Great American Bar Scene, With Heaven on Top has more backing vocals and a lot more horns, as his group inches ever-closer to the E Street Band. Bruce Springsteen’s influence is undeniable, and while Bryan never quite dips into anthemic rock and roll, similar compositional ideas add welcome color to his country palette.
The irresistible songs “Santa Fe” and “Dry Deserts” layer a cello onto Bryan’s trusty fiddle sound, as well as a saxophone, a trombone, and a trumpet trio. In these latter two songs, the barren desert allows his mind to wander, circling back to his family (“Santa Fe”) or a lover (“Dry Deserts”) almost unbidden. Like the best of Springsteen, huge bursts of sound accompany surging emotions that threaten to run away from the singer.
Nowhere is this more clear than “Bad News,” a furious look at America today that lands even harder now than when he teased it last October. “I heard the cops came/ Cocky motherfuckers, ain’t they?” he sings. “And ICE is gonna come bust down your door/ Try to build a house no one builds no more.”
Swells of strings and brass underscore nods to Woody Guthrie and some of his angriest lyrics, like “The middle finger’s rising and it won’t stop showing.” He snaps out the words of the chorus: “I’ve got some bad news/ The fading of the red, white, and blue.” There was a time when Zach Bryan was known for tender, colorful songs like “Something in the Orange” and “Pink Skies.” But he’s a natural firebrand, and “Bad News” instantly becomes one of the best songs about the Trump years.
Bryan sings about saying goodbye to who he used to be, but With Heaven on Top suggests something more complicated: maybe we don’t shed our past selves so much as carry them with us, even as we change. The Oklahoma kid is still there, even on an ‘aeroplane’ to Spain. His mother’s memory travels with him, as do all those dive bars and cross-country road trips. The album’s triumph is that it holds all of this at once — the wanderer and the homesick son, the arena headliner and the guy bombing in Arkansas. Heraclitus was right: you can’t step in the same river twice. But Zach Bryan proves you can keep moving forward while honoring where you’ve been.
