“Tradition” is a word often thrown around in conversations about Country and Americana, two genres where the point is not only to write about your experiences but to tie your experiences into a larger, generational narrative. In Americana, this often ends up boiling down to using instruments, lyrical themes, and aesthetics that call back to the early days of American Folk and Country, to a time when the Great Depression ravaged the American working class, and musicians wrote songs about trying to survive as regular people in a world that seemed stacked against them. In that respect, it may seem strange that singer/songwriter Zacharia Tayler would view his brand of raucous Punk-infused Country as “traditional,” but to him, the real tradition of both Country and Americana has always been rooted in telling the stories of struggling working-class people, the sounds you use to dress up those stories aren’t nearly as important. Tayler’s music is more of a spiritual successor to the longstanding Country tradition than a sonic one, writing songs about the struggles of being a regular person in 2024 in an American landscape that is just as stacked against working people as it ever was. Tackling familiar themes from new angles, the Pittsburgh songwriter explores his place in the post-industrial Appalachian rust belt through his own experiences with mental illness, cultural alienation, workaholism, and labor organizing, expanding the scope of what it means to be a modern blue-collar person in America.
On the new single, “Leave Behind The Blue,” Tayler pens an ode to an America we may never see again. An industrial period in the Country where someone could feed and house a family with a modest position at a factory. Now that technology has entered the picture, Tayler’s new single reminds us of how we all got here. Through vivid imagery and a busy folk-rock arrangement, the singer/songwriter sends a love letter to the simplicity of suburbia. Tayler spins an enticing tale of characters overcoming obstacles that appear out of their control while trying to maintain a modest life. The passionate vocals sit atop an ever-changing arrangement that features moments of classic rock bliss and infectiously explosive crescendos. On “Leave Behind The Blue,” Tayler employs masterful storytelling over an all-encompassing instrumental for a moving and rocking performance.
“When the steel mills left Pittsburgh in the late 80s and early 90s, shortly before I was born, they left behind a lot of blue-collar workers who had made steel work a big point of pride,” explains Tayler. “Growing up, when I did, I never saw the ‘glory days’ of the steel mills, but I did see the crumbling infrastructure they left behind. I did meet a lot of old-heads who seemed stuck, longing for a way of life that no longer existed but one they couldn’t leave behind because they’d built their whole identity around it. ‘Leave Behind the Blue’ is about growing up in that dissolving post-industrial culture, absorbing attitudes and ideas from a dead way of life, and struggling to adjust to the present without fully losing your upbringing.”
