Review: Zach Bryan’s intimate, outsider appeal not lost in the din of the Vikings stadium

It’s amazing: The sadder and quieter Zach Bryan gets on his songs, the louder, rowdier and bigger his concerts are becoming.

The Oklahoma country-folk picker’s latest Twin Cities date Saturday was his largest yet. He packed U.S. Bank Stadium just three years after playing his first club show in Minneapolis at the Fillmore. It’s also been only three years since Bryan was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy, after he went viral posting songs from naval bases.

All the sly-smiling singer-songwriter’s local shows since then have seen next-level fanatical responses from the crowd. Even his Surly Brewing Festival Field show in 2022 saw fans singing along word-for-word, like it was a religious rite. His breakout album, “American Heartbreak,” had been out for only four months at that point.

Bryan’s latest record, “The Great American Bar Scene,” is just a month old, and it’s a more somber and contemplative collection from the quickly maturing 28-year-old twanger. Its hit single “Pink Skies” is a mellow, mostly acoustic song about a funeral.

So you can imagine how surreal it was to hear a crowd of about 50,000 fans — most of them under 30 and living it up — loudly and joyously singing along to that new classic and other recent, downward-leaning tunes.

Too bad it was almost impossible for fans to sing along to Bryan’s fellow Okies in the middle opening slot, the Turnpike Troubadours. After a decent sound for last weekend’s Metallica shows, U.S. Bank Stadium was back to sounding like an acoustic toilet bowl for a lot of Saturday’s concert.

Empty seats added to the sonic morass for the first opening, band SunDown47, led by Minneapolis-based production manager Steve Drymalski — who probably wished he was instead playing his old workplace, Target Center.

Even with more seats filled in, the Troubadours’ earnest, high-energy and genuinely thrilling blend of fiddle and pedal-steel-wrapped twang-rock was muddied and deadened in songs like “Gin, Smoke, Lies” and “Long Hot Summer Day.” Too bad, because the latter featured local music star Dave Simonett of Trampled by Turtles on guest vocals. How about another show in town soon to make up for this mess, fellas?

Fortunately, the sound did get cleaned up and more balanced out for Bryan’s two-hour set, especially the vocals, which was crucial in this case. It’s not because his voice is anything that great. It’s naturally raspy with a tender warble, which could be partly why he’s broken through as a more authentic answer to all the slicker and brawnier Nashville-bred bros passing themselves off as regular-joe countrymen nowadays.

It’s Bryan’s lyrics about true small-time life (not “values”) and real-life struggles of young men that mattered the most to the highly excited crowd. They were there to sing them word-for-word, and did they ever.

From the get-go, they boisterously shouted out the words to the opening song “Overtime.” Fans across town still at the Twins game may have heard the giant chorus created by the third song, “God Speed,” one of the loudest of the night.

Where those songs are more feel-good, problem-shrugging anthems, though, other new songs such as “28″ and “Oak Island” were in the mellower and more haunted mold of “Pink Skies” and seemed heavily influenced by Bruce Springsteen’s stark “Nebraska” album. “Oak Island” is even about a ne’er-do-well brother on the run, like the Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman,” while the new album’s title track shouts out the “Nebraska” track “State Trooper.”

Even Bruce would have been impressed hearing the crowd’s rapturous response to the melancholic “Something in the Orange” and one of the show’s newer and quieter highlights, “East of Sorrow,” including gut-punching lines like, “I lost you in a waiting room / After sleeping there for a week or two / Doctor said he did all he could / You were the last thing I had that was good.”

The campfire-song vibe from the floor to the nosebleed seats was one reason Bryan’s intimate, aw-shucks, singer-songwriter appeal was not lost in the mega-sized concert hall. Another key factor was the way the video production enhanced the show. Like the stage and lighting, it wasn’t anything fancy or arty: just one giant video screen behind the stage that mostly stuck to showing the interplay between Bryan and his well-greased band, which includes one of the best fiddlers in modern country, Lucas Ruge-Jones.

After finishing strong on the big stage with “Burn, Burn, Burn” and “Quittin’ Time,” he and the band moved over to a smaller B-stage on the opposite end of the arena. They finished with a long, jamboree-style jam through “Revival,” one that dates to Bryan’s days in the Navy that helped set him on his voyage. His ascent in the interim seems truly incredible, but not after you’ve seen him live.