An old Jukebox fave meets a new country darling we apparently also kinda like…
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Nortey Dowuona: There are 3 white men I trust. Zach Bryan is one of them. Mainly because he doesn’t attempt to append holier than thou posturing for internet brownie point, beg for bigots approval to make his crashing career successful or fuck around making bad Jeremih songs to appear ahead of the curve. He just writes honest, sincere songs about being a deeply flawed man who is consistently putting himself out there to be loved and to love back, despite the consequences or the punishment of pain, shame, loneliness, failure. Kacey thrives in the midst of these moments and within the turmoil, making a home for herself alongside him, despite it coming apart at the seams due to the aforementioned flaws. And as they sing the final chorus together, you feel the strained, flickering love that is leaning and diminishing, only one breath away from being extinguished.
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Jonathan Bradley: Imagine Zach Bryan two decades ago: this ex-military ne’er-do-well recording lo-fi country ballads on his lonesome out in Oklahoma would have been signed to Lost Highway and then lost in the thickets of Paste write-ups. Now he’s number one on Billboard. Times change, but so do the hooks, and Bryan has landed on a good one, the way he and Kacey Musgraves wail “you only smile like that when you’re drinking,” lovelorn and desolate together. Bryan is a folk singer of negative space; he illuminates his glowing little melodies while the song surrounding him lives in that vast blackness stretching into the great plains beyond.
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Alfred Soto: Zach Bryan writes about blasted, blighted lives, and his workaday conviction elevates the occasionally staid material. Rotgut whiskey and Kacey Musgraves can’t ease his mind. So he dwells in the shadow of memory.
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Michael Hong: Bryan’s gruffness sounds great on his plain arrangements, but the thinness of Musgraves’ voice on her solo take of the chorus makes the whole track feel stiff. The real gem off his self-titled album is with Sierra Ferrell, the plainness making their harmonies and its melodic simplicity shine.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I’ll be honest: the first several times I only listened to this for Kacey Musgraves. The more I hear “I Remember Everything,” however, the more I see how Kacey’s diaphanous, hazy delivery only works because of how Bryan acts as a brusk, grounded foil. He seems like a perfectly pleasant, reclusive, well-therapized man, one who has earned the moment in the sun he’s experienced this year.
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Ian Mathers: It is kind of wild to think that this guy is considered the same basic genre (and has hits on the same charts) as that Morgan Wallen fuck; chunks of this are not that far away from, say, Damien Jurado. I’m sure it’s not Bryan’s only mode (he put out a fucking triple album, for god’s sake), but it works here.
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Thomas Inskeep: The music on the verses (especially the first) almost sounds like it’s being played at the wrong speed? And what’s with Bryan’s mush-mouthed singing voice? Not to mention that this doesn’t sounds like the duet it should be, just two singer’s verses spliced together. I’d love to like this, but not much about it works for me.
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Leah Isobel: “I Remember Everything” is approximately two steps away from Pity Sex; even its flashes of humor bend toward flowery emo sentiment (“You’re like concrete feet in the summer heat/ It burns like hell when two soles meet”). It’s fertile ground, but the weepy arrangement and Zach’s whimpery, crackling vocal oversell it a bit.
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Katherine St Asaph: Three things elevate “I Remember Everything” from the staid “see, this is real country music” ballads that it’s not far off from. Zach Bryan’s songwriting is carefully observed, and his muted voice suggests a low emotional ceiling — making it extra powerful when he rips through it. And in turn Kacey Musgraves’ voice, while still youthful and winning, is maturing nicely into a less tremulous Emmylou or Dolly.
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Hannah Jocelyn: There’s this slightly late guitar strum at 1:34 (and again at 3:03) that’s annoyed me all year, and I have to point it out because nobody else has. Otherwise, this is an above-average Civil Wars song with some pretty 7/4 verses, marred by a rushed production job — the arrangement aims for gravitas, but you need lush Daniel Lanois or Gary Pacsoza production for that, not first-take-best-take performances. Yet if it’s Zach Bryan or Noah Kahan, I’m taking Bryan every time.
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John S. Quinn-Puerta: Between this and Noah Kahan’s ascendancy I’m convinced that folk and country will make it 2013 again through science or magic. If it means more duets, I’ll take it!
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Tara Hillegeist: Soulful melancholy over gentle strumming meant to put the emphasis on the observed detail, the folksy reminiscences, of the singer’s well-waxed lyricism is as much a posture as the cocksure drunkard’s swagger, where country’s concerned; it all comes down to whether you can back the pose up with a sincere enough delivery to match. Good thing Bryan has a voice like an old train engine run hard off homemade distillations, instead of something studio-smooth and syrupy-slick; it sells the vibe almost as well as the images his lyrics conjure up can manage, all by themselves. Musgraves’ lighter touch doesn’t shift the tenor of the piece so much as add another tone to the portrait being sonically painted; the flecks of sunlight and gold, coming in through the glass bottle you can all but hear, sitting not far from Bryan’s hand. Indeed, she’s the one to shed a little needed light on one of those ironic details that can give the rest of a song the kind of wry, bittersweet bite it needs to go down feelingly. For all that the song is a story told by Bryan’s narrator, it’s Musgraves’ girl that’s remembered early, lyrically, as the better tale-spinner of the two. So, naturally, when it’s her turn on the verse, it comes out that the one time Bryan’s narrator went so far as to imagine up a future between the two of them, she already knew he couldn’t really mean it. A less controlled song would’ve found a moment to resolve that tension before it ended; “I Remember Everything” simply lingers in the revelation, and the melancholy, and the might’ve-beens, till the sun comes up and the unwise urge to do more than live with it passes.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: He’s just some guy, which is the point. And this is stately, well-struck, and a little bit boring — “Dawns” did it better, and not just because Maggie Rogers is a much better fit within the Zach Bryan sonic universe — but I still find it charming even through all of the tedious talk of authenticity and roots rock stardom. Much like everything he’s done, “I Remember Everything” is self-conscious of Zach Bryan’s place in the world — the lyric is all lived-in small town signifiers, less a narrative or even a “Don’t You Want Me” style point-counterpoint and more a slice of life, but everything else aims for grandeur. Kacey Musgraves is perhaps the crux of “I Remember Everything” — unlike the rest of the guests (The Lumineers and a bunch of guys that sound like The Lumineers) on Zach Bryan by Zach Bryan, she’s (a) made interesting music herself and (b) grappled with that same lyrical/musical divide in her own work. And yet the slight distance in her performance is what ultimately consigns the song to being an interesting curio rather than a barn-burner: the two sketch slightly different frames on the same moment, Musgraves remembering but Bryan desperately asking to be remembered.
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Brad Shoup: Maybe it’s the sand or the “grown men don’t cry” bit, but this feels like Bryan’s Lana Del Rey homage: I’m kinda surprised the violins weren’t boosted about 25%, or that the drummer didn’t try something more martial. As soon as I realized we were getting a boy-girl duet about slugging down whiskey, I thought about Paisley/Krauss. But Bryan’s not interested in that kind of operatic tragedy. He’s more glum than maudlin, fiddling with the memory of a truck like the screwcap on some Kentucky Gentleman. Musgraves is the voice of reason, or maybe just exasperation; she can’t caress the melody alongside Bryan because that would be commiseration.
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