BY BRETT NIERENGARTEN @PRORODEOBRETT
Zach Neil got his first guitar as a Christmas present at 12-years-old and fell in love with country music when his brother brought home a Garth Brooks CD after his freshman year of college.
“I ended up growing up on that 90s country thing and through that, I discovered that those guys were big George Jones and Merle Haggard fans, so I said ‘well, who’s George Jones and Merle Haggard,’ so I kept just digging deeper,” Neil said. “And then Saturday mornings, the local country station had an oldies show and I would turn it on and sure enough they were playing George Jones, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings type stuff and I just dug it.”
The Canadian born singer-songwriter tasted his first success of his own in music at a young age. He and some high school friends started a band that played local private parties, and Neil would end up taking music much further than that.
They entered, and won, a Battle of the Bands when he was 16. Everyone else was playing rock, but they were a bunch of young kids playing traditional country music.
That same night he was approached by one of the judges, who happened to be a Grammy Award winning audio engineer.
"(He was from the rock world) and he said ‘I’ve got some friends on the country side of things, I’d be happy to make some calls if you want to go meet with them,’” Neil said. “We started getting real busy playing rodeos, festivals, clubs, even though we weren’t old enough to be in the clubs.”
“I didn’t know that I was good enough to do it as a career. But when that Battle of the Bands thing happened, I just kind of said ‘yeah, let’s go do that thing for a couple of years and see what happens.’”
The career choice has paid off. Neil had a Top 40 Texas Country single every year from 2019-2022 and was named the Texas Country Music Association’s Male Artist of the Year in 2022.
Prior to his show at Downtown Cowtown at the Isis in Fort Worth earlier this month, Neil talked to The Cowboy Channel about his career and his methods to making music.
TCC: What was it that initially drew you to country music?
ZN: I was a huge Randy Travis fan, I mean just his voice, it just kind of sucked you in. So, when we first started playing as a band, we were kind of a Randy Travis tribute band. I mean we could play everything. I still remember the moment I was like ‘man, I really love that.’ On the oldies show, they played Amarillo by Morning on a Saturday morning and that was the first time I’d ever heard it. I didn’t know who George Strait was, all I know is I heard that fiddle intro and it just made me go ‘what is that?’
TCC: What is your songwriting process like?
ZN: Sometimes songs come to you driving down the road, sometimes you sit at home for two hours staring at the ceiling with a guitar trying to think of stuff. You try to listen to bits of conversation and pick up interesting things that you’ll overhear. For me, it starts with a melody. I’m a melody-driven guy, so I usually gravitate toward a melody first and then we’ll kind of sit back and go ‘okay, now what lyric sounds like what I’m playing.’
TCC: Over time, I imagine you’ve learned what goes together well and what you want to try where?
ZN: To your point, during COVID, we were sitting around doing Facebook Lives, trying to stay connected. But we actually recorded the last single I had out on Texas Radio, everything was not in a studio. Everything was what we call flying tracks. And I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, but we said ‘well, we can’t all get in a studio right now, so let’s see what happens. So, I spent a lot of time on pre-production with the guy who produced it and I said ‘this is what we want, this is where we want fiddle to play, this is where we want steel to play and so on.’ What’s funny about it is, it’s the first time we’ve ever done it, and it’s probably the best thing I’ve done.
TCC: That story exemplifies how to make music, is there anything else that you learned along the way that makes the process easier?
ZN: I think just being around other great musicians, you just pick things up, and I think you puck things up and don’t necessarily realize it at the time. But you just see how they approach certain things. I always want to keep learning. You never want to go ‘man, I know how to do this.’ I’m always trying to grow and I think just being around great musicians you pick things up you can carry forward with you.
TCC: How important is to realize you need to continue to learn?
ZN: You know it’s funny, I mentioned my dad loved Ray Price and I remember seeing a Ray Price interview and they asked what he thinks when he listens back to Ray Price records and he made the comment and he said ‘I can’t listen to my records, because all I hear is the things I wish I’d done differently.’ And I totally get that. I listen back to stuff I’ve done and I go ‘man, I should’ve emphasized that more, I should’ve phrased it this way, I should’ve changed that melody line.’ And so the flip side of that, is you can tend to overthink it and music is not meant to be a mental process, it’s meant to be a performance.
Some answers have been condensed for clarity. You can listen to Zach’s music here, follow him on social media here, and get updates on his tour and more here. Special thank you to Joey Hollis.