Zach Bryan: Home for the Holidays
BOK Center
December 13, 2024
When the BOK Center announced Zach Bryan’s “Home for the Holidays,” a three-night residency, I wondered if it might not be grasping a little bit. The arena has 20,000 seats. Would Bryan—the top-40-reaching, Grammy-winning/Grammy-boycotting, 28-year-old Oologah, Oklahoma native—really fill it three nights in a row?
But it seems that Tulsa (and surrounding areas, as you could tell by the lost expressions on many faces and the confused traffic around downtown) has fully embraced its newest music celebrity.
Audiences packed out all three shows, apparently, though I only caught Friday. I regret I didn’t arrive early enough for the free pre-show “plaza party” outside featuring performances by other local artists. By the time I approached the box office, all that was left were some ice skaters out front hobbling and falling down and holding hands as “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off” spilled from the speakers.
I showed up expecting a somewhat rowdy crowd, especially following Bryan’s Instagram story in which he fired off a handgun multiple times as he urged folks to attend the Tulsa shows. Throughout the BOK’s 16 years in business, I’ve been to see St. Vincent, The Black Keys, Metallica, Judas Priest, Run the Jewels, Heart, Joan Jett, Taylor Swift, Tyler Childers, Lorde. Every single one of those audiences was rowdier than Friday’s Zach Bryan crowd, which was (as I first encountered them in the lobby) young, mustached, overwhelmingly ballcapped but with a fair number of cowboy hats, and quiet, almost tame—though their phones might be to blame (or thank) for that one.
Inside the arena, it was more of the same, at least at first. During Matt Maeson’s short opening set, showgoers were notably serious, though Maeson did get us to sing along with him just before he left the stage. Once Bryan’s band came on, though, packing the stage with at least 12 people, including horn players from Tulsa’s own King Cabbage Brass Band, the crowd was absolutely rapt. Nearly everyone stood to sing along with the opening song, “Overtime,” the second track of Bryan’s 2023 self-titled album. A couple of songs in, during “God Speed,” cameras scanned the crowd kiss-cam-style, catching cheesy grins from kids and adults alike, with little ones all over standing in the aisles to catch a good view.
There was plenty of cheese in the whole production, including Star Wars-esque seamless Jumbrotron panel transitions capturing all sides of (and all smiles on) the stage. I will say Bryan hit the “We love you, Tulsa” card a little hard, but the crowd never really seemed to tire of this gracious behavior. Another of his refrains: “Here’s a song called X. Hope you don’t hate it.”
The band’s sense of fashion ran the gamut: button-downs (including a Christmasy pearl snap), an alien t-shirt, a Korn t-shirt, three cowboy hats. One fairly consistent element: a bunch of tattoos. I’d argue that the most notable accessory of the night was Bryan’s intermittent crazed-eye smile, always paired with a bit of a howl, a familiar, druggy kind of expression that screams “Southern bad boy.” This mannerism felt a little dialed up, even overdone, but it never failed to hype up the hometown crowd.
Bryan might be a top-40 country artist, but it’s clear he’s a singer-songwriter first, and his set held elements of folk, bluegrass, and Americana as well as pop and alt-country. Even when the songs veered toward basic (as with “Hey Driver,” his song with The War and Treaty that spent 27 weeks on the Billboard Hot Country chart) or when the band was a bit too performatively smiley, the grit of Bryan’s voice (and often his lyrics) kept the thing grounded. And I really do think the band was having a hell of a lot of fun. Throughout the night, alongside KCBB’s horns, we got to hear from a banjo, a fiddle, a pedal steel, and a harmonica.
I saw plenty of headbangers in the audience, too, once folks got warmed up. One of the biggest crowd-pleasers: “Something in the Orange,” which Bryan introduced with an apology. (He didn’t want to depress us with a sad song, he said, but was afraid people would be mad if he didn’t play the hit that helped push him into the mainstream in 2022.) While much of the audience clung to every word of this raw, lyrically-focused tune, the real highlight of the night was the “Revival” encore, again featuring KCBB—but also Santa, a T-shirt cannon, and the stage’s Christmas tree being propelled into midair.
The song went on for quite a while, but no one appeared to be getting bored. With the engaged crowd and enlarged band, the whole show really felt like a holiday, like a homecoming. Was Bryan spectacular enough to warrant his packing out three BOK shows in a row? He’s certainly more than just another top-40 artist, but it’s hard to tell how much that even matters for local fans. He’s from home, and Oklahoma loves a hometown star. Especially one who, like Bryan did, takes us with him into the wider music world: as soon as his Tulsa shows wrapped up, he whisked the King Cabbage guys off to Brooklyn to play with him at the Barclays Center.
