Zimmerman floats to top of Nashville’s rising class
Singer-songwriter has rousing new album, No. 1 song on country radio in short order
The spoils of fame are coming fast for emerging country star Bailey Zimmerman. Texas singersongwriter Cody Johnson gave him a standing offer to come ride horses at his ranch. Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger flew him on a private plane to his home in Canada to spend some time writing songs. Guitar whiz Gary Clark Jr. and rapper Jelly Roll partied with him backstage at the CMT Awards.
Recently, Kid Rock had him over for dinner at his ranch outside Nashville, Tennessee. “He freestyled for us at dinner, and we went in, and he showed us his pool and his bowling alley,” Zimmerman said in an April interview. “… He let me do a TikTok in one of the bars!”
Zimmerman, 23, is boisterous and amiable, openhearted and still a little stupefied by it all. Only 2 ½ years have passed since he posted a clip of himself singing one verse of his first original song to TikTok, went to bed and woke up to 1 million views. Now, he has the No. 1 song on country radio, “Rock and a Hard Place,” and has released his debut album, the comfortably bruising and appealingly bruised “Religiously. The Album.”
But this is how Nashville works now, at least sometimes. Social media is increasingly dictating how country music is evolving, and at times, that’s in unexpected, lightly chaotic directions.
“I never wanted to be, like, ‘country,’ ” Zimmerman said at the East Nashville home of his producer, Austin Shawn, where he records all of his music, cutting vocals in a closet. “Whatever I want to make that day, that’s what I want to be. Some days you’ll see me in penny loafers, and then sometimes you’ll see me in Air Force 1s.”
Zimmerman is a modern country star in a hybrid mold. He has a rigorously raspy voice and sings with power he has mainlined from his primary influences, many of which are rock acts: Nickelback, Three Days Grace, Foo Fighters and Hinder — bands that specialize in puffed-chest emoting. Zimmerman’s favorite band is the melodic hard rock outfit Tesla.
But he is also clearly an inheritor of Nashville’s recent crop of shaggy-atthe-edges superstars — singers like powerhouse Luke Combs or the genre’s reigning titan, Morgan Wallen, who have collectively iterated beyond the boyfriend and gentleman country of the mid-2010s, and whose songwriting and commitment to genre mark them as somewhat more traditional than the
bro-country breakouts of the early 2010s.
Shawn said that “the door has been opened” by artists such as Combs and Wallen, “even people like Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers.” Shawn, who produced or co-produced every song on Zimmerman’s album, added, “Is he a country singer? Or a rock singer? Or a folk-Americana singer with a little bit of a gritty edge?”
Those lines are blurry in Nashville’s contemporary mainstream. Given that preexisting context, Zimmerman has floated to the top of Nashville’s rising class with remarkable ease and speed. The ascent has been even more remarkable given his starting point. Zimmerman is from Louisville, Illinois, a town in the southern part of the state with a population of just more than 1,000 and proximate to not much. (“A two-hour drive to get to a mall to go school shopping.”) His father owned a trucking business; his mother owned the family car dealership with Zimmerman’s grandfather and uncle.
When Zimmerman
struck out on his own, he took on some of the hardest physical labor available: working on natural gas pipelines in West Virginia. “The gnarliest, most chaotic work,” he said. “Screaming, yelling, breaking stuff. Hard hats, walkie talkies, whatever they had in their hands, they’d chuck it at you. Like, you’d walk home with black eyes, bruises from people chucking drinks on you and just belittling you.”
He moved home and began custom-building lifted trucks — pickups with super tall wheels — and posted videos about them on TikTok, eventually amassing 60,000 followers.
One day in late 2020, Gavin Lucas, a high school acquaintance who wrote songs, heard Zimmerman singing on Snapchat and was impressed. For a couple of weeks, they fiddled around and eventually, on Christmas night, wrote a verse for a new song. The resulting TikTok changed both of their lives — Zimmerman resigned from his union the next day. Within a couple of weeks, they had finished the song — the rowdy country-rock
number “Never Comin’ Home” — Googled information on how to record songs, and driven to Nashville to cut it in a real studio, splitting the $3,000 cost. (Zimmerman borrowed his half from his mother.)
Attention came at a disorienting speed. When Zimmerman first met Chief Zaruk, an industry insider who would become one of his managers, “I thought he was the mayor of Nashville, ’cause that’s how everybody introduced him on the Zoom call,” Zimmerman said. “I’m just like, man, why is the mayor of Nashville trying to sign me? This makes no sense.”
But the kismet continued. “Morgan was one of the first artists I ever met. He was walking up to
Big Loud just randomly,” Zimmerman said, referring to offices for the label and management company. “And he was like, ‘Hey man, I’m a big fan of your song “Fall in Love.’’ ’ … Morgan has just been such a big part of my life since 2015.”
Zimmerman is the first opening act on Wallen’s tour that’s on hold for the headliner’s vocal rest.
In October, Zimmerman
released his debut
EP, “Leave the Light On,” which remains in the
Top 50 of the all-genre Billboard album chart. This is owing to his success at radio, but also to Zimmerman’s relentless presence on TikTok and Instagram. He is his own best promoter, and his success underscores how even Nashville, the most hidebound of music industry towns, is increasingly powerless against the tide of social media.
Unexpected things keep happening to Zimmerman — most recently, it’s the cross-genre collaboration on the soundtrack of the “Fast X” film, “Won’t Back Down,” with Irish crooner Dermot Kennedy and rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again, making for a trio of blood-letter vocalists. But Zimmerman still prefers to operate as if there are no guarantees.
He recalled playing one of his first songs for his father. “You need to chase this,” he said his father told him.
“He’s like, ‘I wasted my whole life not chasing nothing, man. You need to chase something.’ ”