“Homegrown”
Zac Brown Band
Written by Zac Brown, Wyatt Durrette, and Niko Moon
Zac Brown Band has been doing so many variations on the same handful of themes – relaxing, drinking, digging your hometown – that each new release has to mix thing up a bit to justify its existence.
“Homegrown” attempts to do so by incorporating a more aggressive production. Nothing too crazy. Think Mellencamp, circa “Pink Houses.” I think they might have been going for a gospel feel toward the end, but that just makes it sound even more like Mellencamp. Circa “Pink Houses.”
It’s a perfectly fine record, one that covers very familiar lyrical territory while borrowing more from eighties middle America rock and roll than is usual for the band. It will sound better on radio than the majority of what it’s surrounded by, as ZBB jams always do. But once its run at radio is done, there’s no real need to play this particular ZBB jam over one of their other dozen or so hits that are already in recurrent rotation.
Grade: B
Yeah, at this point ZBB’s fun-but-same-y drinking/blazing songs are at a bit of a disadvantage, because stuff like this is a strong B+ relative to the rest of country radio, but a B-/C+ relative to their own output.
I still really wish that they’d released “Day That I Die” off of Uncaged. That might be my favorite song of theirs.
I’m a ZBB fan, have all their albums except the GH. There’s nothing special about this song. If this is from a new album, I hope the rest of the album is a lot better.
No argument here, this is way above average radio fare, but nothing special for ZBB…except for one line. Maybe it’s just me, but “I got everything I need and nothing that I don’t” is the best description of contentment I’ve heard from a country song in a long long time. I’ve been cranking this one up just so I can belt out the end of the chorus. It’s that rare ‘my life is great and I’m happy’ song that doesn’t feel cheap to me.
To be honest I’d give it an A-. I like the production cause it’s simple and effective. They tend to still harmonize really well which is good to see. The song overall lyric wise isn’t groundbreaking but this song likes to keep it simple. Overall I give an A-.
It covers similar ground to a lot of songs on radio and in their catalog but they make their bones by mixing up their sound. They much like Eric Church don’t sound like anything else on country radio.
They are playing chess while others are playing checkers.