Giving fans some more insight into The Great American Bar Scene.
Zach Bryan‘s last studio project, The Great American Bar Scene, is a record fans are still raving about. Although it appears that ZB has quite a few projects cooking on the horizon, tracks from his last album still make fans tilt their heads and think at times. With the tracklist filled with heaters like “American Nights,” “Pink Skies,” and “28,” many fan favorites appear on this tracklist.
Although ZB hasn’t spoken about the album much publicly since the release, he did take to his Instagram story to share how they came up with the album art for the record. And the imagery is personal to him.
The album features a caricature-style drawing of people enjoying themselves at a bar. The image features four separate images, and because of the style of art, it’s hard to make out faces or pinpoint what bar they might be at. However, if one thing is true, the photographs that inspired these drawings are vintage.
That’s because they are. Zach Bryan recently reposted a photo from a bar wall, sharing with fans that the imagery was used for The Great American Bar Scene‘s album art, and two of the folks featured in it are his grandparents.
“The cover of TGABS is a photo of my grandma and grandpa. The photo sits on the wall at a bar in Oklahoma.”
If you want to see the image for yourself, the photo sits on the wall of Dobbie’s Bar in Dewey, Oklahoma. Dobbie’s was the bar selected for the early listen party of The Great American Bar Scene prior to the record’s release, and later in the year, ZB told fans that it’s one of his favorite bars in Oklahoma.
“I have a bar, it’s called Dobbie’s. If anyone ever needs a day beer or good conversation with America’s finest.”
One fan commented on the Tweet shared by the Zach Bryan Archive’s Facebook page and the image of the photo on the wall at Dobbie’s, which is super cool to see the collection of images that inspired the album’s artwork.
Dobbie’s looks like a GREAT dive bar, and if ZB’s grandparents were gracing it, then you know it’s got to be a solid spot.
Learning this makes the album art so meaningful. It shows how personal this record was to Bryan, highlighting his life’s raw emotions at the time, which he touched on with the album’s preface.
“Preface to ‘The Great American Bar Scene’
The making of this album tested me and everyone close to me. It drove me to my ends and my beginnings. I saw the lights of Paris after saying I would for ten years, road the coast of Australia with a beautiful woman, was locked in a pub until 7 am in Ireland, walked my favorite street in New York over a hundred times, thought I was going to bleed out in a field in Tennessee, spent a few hours in handcuffs, hugged my grandma more than a few times, laid in the grass of my mother’s hometown, sang “State Trooper” in a bar in South of Boston, and wrote something that I think was important.
I wrote and produced all of these with the help of some truly great friends. I finally felt like I’s making music again. If you don’t like it, I assume it’s not intended for you. Grab your beers through tears & fears, The Great American Bar Scene.”
The intertwining of his family in the album art expands on that.
Throw on a song or two before you go.
“The Great American Bar Scene”
“American Nights”
