Billboard cover star and the ‘Future of Country’ star, Zach Top, is bringing 90s country music back. The crooner explains why he thinks his “I Never Lie” became successful, the accidental start of a band with his siblings, how he’s developed his style and more!
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00:00I wanted to be a cowboy really bad, and my parents definitely realized, and I think I realized at some point that I was no good at being an actual cowboy, so maybe the closest I could get was to sing about them.
00:10Obviously I've got a sonically reminiscent sort of thing going on from the 90s stuff,
00:36but I feel like I cut my teeth on the same stuff that the 90s guys cut theirs on.
00:43For one thing, I'm honored that people see me as sort of a spearhead or a leader back towards traditional country music or country music the way that I fell in love with it and still love.
01:00It's a fun spot to be in. I think it's a lot of just the right place, right time sort of a thing. Country music has always been cyclical.
01:10We've got our bread and butter, the roots, the traditions where we came from, and something new and a little edgy comes along and everybody gets excited about that for good reason,
01:21and kind of run with that for a little while until people are like, yeah, but this is where we came from, and let's get back to it a little bit, and so I think I came along at the right time for that.
01:32I was playing piano before I played guitar, but for whatever reason, I didn't have a whole lot of interest in Chopin and Bach and Beethoven and stuff like that.
01:51If somebody could have taught me to play piano like Pig Robbins, maybe I would have been excited about that, but the style of music I was into, the guitar lent itself more to that, I guess, so I kind of kicked and screamed through, shoot, it must have been seven or eight years of piano lessons, and they finally gave up on that, I guess, but I loved guitar.
02:12I played, probably from the time I was seven to 15, I played guitar for, shoot, two, three hours a day, probably. I just loved it.
02:29You mentioned the family band thing. We kind of stumbled on that by accident.
02:34I started playing guitar, my sister Maddie, she's a year and a half older than me, she started playing fiddle about the same time, and then shortly thereafter, my little brother Joram, he's a year and a half younger than me, he started playing mandolin, and then my oldest sister Laken was the one who taught us piano lessons.
02:50She picked up the bass, so we had us a little four-piece bluegrass band, I guess, and, well, it didn't start out as a band, we were all just kind of learning the instruments independently of one another.
03:01A good family friend of ours, he's actually our orthodontist, he'd heard we'd been playing a little music and wondered if we'd like to open up for the Patsy Cline musical that was coming to the local high school, and my dad was like, well, Randy, I don't know, you're going to have to ask the kids, I'm not going to answer that for them.
03:17I don't remember this, but I've been told the story enough times, I guess he put me on the phone, and Randy asked if we'd like to play a show, and I was like, yeah, we'd love to play your show, and when is it?
03:30He said, well, it's a couple months from now, and I said, well, perfect, by then we'll know some songs, and we'd love to play your show.
03:35So that was kind of how the whole family band thing started, and I guess we never gave it up for about the next ten years.
03:47I really didn't dive into writing much until I started coming to Nashville.
03:53My producer, Carson Chamberlain, was kind of the guy that brought me to town.
03:58He kind of posed it as a question to me whether or not I wanted to be a writer or whether it was important to me to write my own songs, and I kind of just said, I don't know, but I'll try it out.
04:08So we did, and he set up some co-writes for us and dove into it, and I really enjoyed it, mostly written with a bunch of old school writers, guys that were having hits in the 80s and 90s and stuff like that.
04:20And a big thing I feel like that I've picked up is don't try to be too tricky with the lyrics or the wordplay or stuff like that.
04:30Just say what needs to be said that gets the message of the song across and makes people feel something.
04:38I've been slowly going out of my mind
04:44I think that's another thing that's a bit of a dying art in Nashville, or just songwriting in general.
04:51If I just wrote songs about my life, my life's pretty boring, so I think people would lose interest pretty quickly.
04:57But if we stretch the truth a little bit, it comes from somewhere, honest, and then kind of make a story that's universal out of it.
05:04The day we wrote it, we kind of sat around after we got done making the work tape, and it was like, dang, this thing might have the makings of a first radio single.
05:13Which was kind of funny, sure enough, that was the first single we put out to radio.
05:17I think it's a great introduction to me and my music, that's one of those songs that doesn't have a big story to it, it's just kind of fun.
05:25A toe-tapper, a dancing song type of thing.
05:29I'm super excited about the response it got from everybody at radio.
05:34It's kind of like, well if you like this one, great, and if you don't, I don't know that there's much different coming.
05:47It's kind of crazy, the response that people had to I Never Lie.
05:51It's kind of crazy, the response that people had to I Never Lie.
05:54And I don't know that I would have picked that one to be the next one that blew up like that.
06:01I think that's one of the most country things on the album.
06:05Between that and maybe Use Me or something, those are just old school country ballad type of things.
06:12So for people to gravitate toward those, it's cool for me, I love it.
06:21I just got a new guitar, I love how that thing sounds, just sitting around messing with that.
06:26I've had a few new ideas come out, just musically.
06:30And heck, it can be as little as something you see on a t-shirt or a billboard or whatever that you pull out and think, hey that could be a song title or a hook idea or whatever.
06:42I think the biggest thing is just living life and trying to find a clever way to put what you're feeling and what you're seeing into words.
06:54And something that other people can resonate with as well.
07:02I love fiddle and steel guitar and that old school type of song.
07:07And it doesn't need to be old school, it's going to keep moving forward and keep progressing and keep being fresh and new.
07:13But the biggest thing I think is exactly that.
07:17The songs mean something and they say something and it keeps making people feel something.
07:30I don't think what I do is ever really going to change all that much.
07:35I love all different types of music.
07:38I think it's interesting, Ray Charles is a great example.
07:43He put out that, I know at least one big long country album.
07:48I say country, he covered a bunch of country songs but did them in Ray's style.
07:53And that kind of thing intrigues me a lot.
07:57Find some songs from other genres that I just love the songs and rework them to be exactly what I do.
08:06And give a different perspective on that song.
08:12You're not going to hear me put out a rock and roll album or a reggae album or anything.
08:16I don't know, you never know. I'll never say never, I'll say that.
08:20For right now I feel like I'm doing exactly what I love to do.
08:24And hopefully other people, fans and everything keeps enjoying that kind of thing for a long time.
08:31And I'm going to keep doing it, whether they do or not I suppose.