Before the Fame: Zach Bryan’s First Live Show Was a Nine-Hour Gig at a Sandwich Shop - Now He Sells Out Stadiums

Oh, how the turntables.

Zach Bryan is now one of the biggest artists on the planet, with the ‘Something in the Orange’ hitmaker regularly dropping chart-topping albums and selling out colossal stadiums across North America, setting a host of attendance records in the process.

It wasn't always this peachy, however. The Oklahoma native famously blew up on social media after he shared a grainy, sweaty video of him performing ‘Heading South’ outside his Navy barracks. He then dropped his debut album, DeAnn, and, well, the rest is history, with Bryan now possessing over 20 RIAA Platinum hits and one incredibly rare Diamond-certified anthem, ‘Something in the Orange’.

During his fascinating conversation with Bruce Springsteen for Rolling Stone towards the latter half of 2024, Bryan recalls how, because of the sudden, meteoric nature of his ascent after that initial video, he only played his first live show in 2019.

Springsteen incredulously asks, “Now, let me get this straight. You didn’t do your first public performance till 2019?”, with Bryan laughing, “This is funny because when I was in the Navy…there’s a Potbelly subs. It’s like a franchise sub place. They call me and they’re like, ‘You should come play all day, for nine hours’. So I remember playing that nine hours. I was just playing covers. And they gave me a $60 check. I got it, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m a professional musician now’”.

$60 for a mammoth nine-hour set equates to roughly $6.60 per hour less than the US minimum wage. Springsteen stresses how this makes Bryan's stadium-filling tour a mere five years after this Potbelly Sandwich Works gig all the more impressive, “What’s mind-boggling is if your first public performance was like 2019, and [now] you are selling out [arenas] and you have some stadium gigs coming. This is crazy!”

Just last year, Bryan delivered the largest single-headliner ticketed concert in US history at Ann Arbor's Michigan Stadium, performing to a whopping 112,408 fans. In doing so, he narrowly overtook George Strait's record of 110,905 attendees.

Now, the ‘Dawns’ singer-songwriter is preparing to release a brand new album, With Heaven On Top, this Friday (January 9th), the follow-up to 2024's The Great American Bar Scene.

Bryan's string of controversies in the past two years - including being accused of emotional abuse by his ex, Brianna LaPaglia, and getting arrested in Oklahoma following an argument with a police officer - don't seem to be hampering his progression into the upper echelon of modern music. In recent months, Bryan has revealed that he has sworn off alcohol, with the country-folk titan then getting married to Samantha Leonard in a secret ceremony in Spain last week.

It appears, therefore, that Bryan is in a healthy headspace as he gears up for the arrival of With Heaven On Top. The project is set to consolidate Bryan's position as a contemporary country trailblazer, with Bryan then taking this batch of new songs on the road for his eagerly anticipated World Tour throughout the year.

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