Review: Zach Bryan sings through illness, drops surprise cameo in Charlotte show
It’s almost quaint to think about Zach Bryan in July 2021, onstage at The Fillmore Charlotte, a couple thousand fans packed in for a benefit concert alongside then-Carolina Panthers star Christian McCaffrey.
Back then, Bryan still felt like a cult artist, an internet-born songwriter with a fervent but relatively niche following.
That makes the scene on Saturday night at Bank of America Stadium a little hard to wrap our heads around: From the upper deck, Bryan was sometimes hard to hear — not because the sound system was janky, but because roughly 75,000 fans were singing over him, word for word, at full volume.
If anything, he didn’t reshape his old club show to fit a stadium. He simply expanded it severalfold while asking the crowd to do more of the work.
And over 27 songs across 2 hours and 15 minutes, the remarkable thing is how much of that earlier version of the now-30-year-old Oklahoma-born singer-songwriter remains intact — not to mention how well he can sound despite the sinus infection he said he woke up with in Charlotte on Saturday morning.
Just after 9 p.m., he emerged from an opening in the stands at the 50-yard line to his walk-up music (the Hendrix-esque “Star-Spangled Banner” guitar lick that opens “Overtime”); then he climbed onto the in-the-round stage to join an almost comically large band, which includes fiddles and cellos, a five-piece brass section, steel guitar, multiple backing vocalists and the standard assortment of guitars, bass and drums.
The production’s video elements — a blend of traditional live footage, wide-angle and close-up shots, and music-video highlights — were understated. The lighting, too, was relatively simple. There were no elaborate theatrics, no attempt to overwhelm the space with spectacle.
Which is fine. His legion of fans were really the only things needed to make it all work.
When Bryan launched into “Something in the Orange,” for instance, the crowd didn’t just sing along. It overtook him. By the first chorus, his voice was nearly drowned out by the sound of the audience, thousands of voices pushing the song forward together.
The only gimmick up on stage on Saturday night? A celebrity cameo. And it wasn’t Christian McCaffrey.
Anyone paying close attention probably saw it coming.
Not even half an hour into his set, the singer-songwriter said: “I had a buddy before the show, he calls me. His name’s Shane Gillis. He’s playing at the arena in town tonight doing stand-up. And he’s like, ‘Dude, are you kidding me? On the same night? You had to do that.’”
“I had no idea he was here!” Bryan tried to plead in his defense, before dedicating the raw, emotionally intense 2024 folk-rock ballad “Dawns” to Gillis.
Yup, Bryan practically telegraphed the appearance.
All the same, when the comedian — who had earlier in the evening headlined at Spectrum Center — materialized onstage late in the evening as part of the encore, it still played as a shocker. And even if it felt a little strange that Bryan would tap Gillis for a cover of Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” the bit still killed, with the comic stumbling awkwardly all the way through it, to slightly endearing but mostly amusing effect.
But that side quest aside, one of the night’s most defining features would prove Bryan’s between-song storytelling — loose, rambling, sometimes funny, sometimes strange, and almost always delivered like he was talking to a few friends instead of tens of thousands of people.
In setting up “Nine Ball,” he drifted into quieter, more personal territory with a story about his father and his grandfather, and a bar where pool games doubled as a way to scrape together money for drinks.
Later, he veered suddenly into politics. “I’ll never forget it,” Bryan said. “One time, it was Christmas Eve, I was in my living room and I was writing this song … and I swear to God, four months later, the Department of Homeland Defense (he meant Homeland Security) was after me. It was the craziest f------ story in my life.” The song that followed, “Bad News,” briefly shifted the tone, with visuals of immigrant families filling the video screens. It was one of the few moments where Bryan’s storytelling reached beyond his usual personal lens into something broader — but even then, it felt less like a statement and more like another story, told in the same unpolished, conversational voice that carried the rest of the night.
Then in the show’s homestretch, Bryan spun an offbeat story about a spontaneous trip to Spain with friends that included a plan to run with the bulls that they figured would kill them and a chance encounter with the woman who would become his wife, Samantha Leonard. But the song he wrote about her, “Slicked Back,” isn’t a straightforward love song. It also throws shade at his ex.
That’s the throughline of Bryan’s now-supersized live show: Even the rough-around-the-edges elements feel like part of the design.
As for the sinus infection? It didn’t derail anything.
Instead, it reinforced the sense that what mattered wasn’t technical precision, but connection — the shared experience of the songs themselves. And all of it built toward the same destination, with a payoff that was unmistakable:
“Revival,” Bryan’s signature closer, didn’t so much begin as erupt. What started as a chorus became a chant, then a celebration, then something closer to a release. Bryan stretched it out across something close to 20 minutes, weaving in introductions of his band members, letting each take a turn at showing off their prowess, while the crowd jumped, shouted and swayed in unison.
From the upper deck, you could feel it physically — a low, collective rumble, the structure of the stadium seeming to vibrate beneath it.
It was hard not to wonder, only half-jokingly, whether it was safe to be up there.
Still, any lingering questions about scale had largely answered themselves.
The venue changed. The crowd multiplied. At its core, though, the show was exactly the same.
Zach Bryan’s setlist
1. “Overtime”
2. “Open the Gate”
3. “Appetite”
4. “Something in the Orange”
5. “God Speed”
6. “Say Why”
7. “Dawns”
8. “Nine Ball”
9. “Hey Driver”
10. “American Nights”
11. “Oklahoma Smokeshow”
12. “You’ll Get By”
13. “Santa Fe”
14. “Pink Skies”
15. “Don’t Give Up on Me”
16. “Heavy Eyes”
17. “Burn, Burn, Burn”
18. “Bad News”
19. “East Side of Sorrow”
20. “Motorcycle Drive By”
21. “Skin”
22. “Heading South”
23. “Fifth of May”
24. “Slicked Back”
25. “I Remember Everything”
Encore:
26. “Lawyers, Guns and Money”
27. “Revival”
This story was originally published April 19, 2026 at 5:13 AM.
