“People always get this wrong.”
That is how Zach Bryan answered Matthew McConaughey when the actor asked about the most famous video of his life. “Not in a rude way,” Zach added, “but people get this wrong a lot.”
The two sat down on a porch for a talk that runs a little over two hours. Zach posted it on his own YouTube channel to go with his new eight-song project, “Young Manhood & Other Donatable Organs.” It came out Oct. 16 and opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s country albums chart. Holler pulled out the “Heading South” exchange on Nov. 10.
For anyone who knows him mostly from the radio, Zach is the 30-year-old Oklahoma singer behind “Something in the Orange” and “I Remember Everything,” his duet with Kacey Musgraves. He joined the Navy at 17 and served eight years, writing songs on the side the whole time.
“Heading South” is the one everybody points to. In 2019, he sang it into a phone outside his barracks, sweating in a gray T-shirt. The clip traveled far beyond the base. Last month the song crossed one billion plays on Spotify, Whiskey Riff reported. Only two of his other songs have done that.
So McConaughey asked the natural question: “Was that song your first hit?”
Zach says no. By his telling, he had been putting up videos of himself singing with a guitar on Twitter, now called X, for about two years. He once told Joe Rogan what those early posts meant to him. “It was like my validation in the world,” he said.
Then he posted a song called “Man That’s Never Known You.” According to Holler’s account of the interview, he reportedly woke up the next morning to 50,000 retweets.
He moved fast after that. “A few days go by, and now I’m like, I have to strike while the irons hot,” he told McConaughey. He put up another original, “Condemned.” A third song, “Letting Someone Go,” followed.
“Heading South” reportedly came about a month later, and it went on YouTube instead of Twitter. “‘Heading South’ was kind of an after-thought,” Zach said. “That’s why it wasn’t on my first album or anything.”
The track lists back him up. Each of those earlier songs is on “DeAnn,” the debut album he named for his mother and released in August 2019. “Heading South” had to wait for his second album, “Elisabeth,” in May 2020. The website Saving Country Music noticed the order at the time. On Aug. 31, 2019, its writer said “Condemned” had “started swirling around YouTube a few weeks ago.”
Zach’s channel has the whole porch talk. Holler’s time stamp puts this exchange at about 1 hour and 15 minutes in.
Zach tells Matthew McConaughey which songs came first
His channel also carries an early video of the song he says changed everything. This is the YouTube upload, since the original Twitter post is not something we could find.
Zach sings “Man That’s Never Known You” with just a guitar
And this is the one most fans thought came first.
The “Heading South” video filmed outside his Navy barracks
Zach has never dressed up how that last one came together. Holler reported that he told Apple Music in 2020 he wrote it in Florida while heading into a hotel one night. “I recorded it as fast as I could so I could go inside and go to sleep,” he said. “And then, like, two months later is when it took off.”
That rushed recording is now a billion-play song he sings in stadiums. “Man That’s Never Known You” sits at track nine on “DeAnn,” right where he left it.