N
ot for the first time today, Zach Bryan is making his new friend laugh. Bryan is trying to arrange himself on a plush white studio couch for a filmed conversation, and it’s making him self-conscious. “Do I look pompous with my legs crossed?” he asks.
The guy next to him, Bruce Springsteen, who owns the couch, the studio, and the entire Colts Neck, New Jersey, farm surrounding it, cracks up as he chimes in: “What’s the level of my pomposity on this?”
Bryan spent his childhood on a Navy base in Okinawa, Japan, and then in Oklahoma, worlds away from New Jersey’s Monmouth County. He was all of six years old when The Rising came out. Still, Springsteen is one of his biggest heroes — he has a lyric from the Nebraska track “State Trooper” (“Deliver me from nowhere”) tattooed on his left bicep. Springsteen, in turn, has become a huge fan of Bryan, whose finely crafted, roots-inflected tales of American life owe more than a little to the older…
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