NASHVILLE — The spoils of fame are coming fast for the emerging country star . The
Texas singer-songwriter Cody Johnson gave him a standing offer to come ride horses at his ranch. The Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger flew him on a private plane to his home in
Canada to spend some time writing songs. The guitar whiz Gary Clark Jr. and the singing ex-rapper partied with him backstage at the CMT Awards. Recently, Kid Rock had him over for dinner at his ranch outside Nashville. “He freestyled for us at dinner and we went in and he showed us his pool and his bowling alley and all his guns,” Zimmerman said last month, still a little awe-struck, enthusiastically sipping a Bacardi and Coke at the bar at Topgolf. “He let me do a TikTok in one of the bars!” Zimmerman, 23, is boisterous and amiable, openhearted and still a little stupefied by it all. Only two and a half years have passed since he first posted a clip of himself singing one verse of an original song — his first ever — to TikTok, went to bed, and woke up to a million views. Now, he’s got the No. 1 song at country radio, ; is the first opening act on the current Morgan Wallen stadium tour; and is on the cusp of releasing his debut album on Friday, the comfortably bruising and appealingly bruised “Religiously. The Album.” But this is how Nashville works now, at least sometimes.
Social Media is increasingly dictating how country
music is evolving, and sometimes that’s in unexpected, lightly chaotic directions. “I never wanted to be, like, ‘country,’” Zimmerman said earlier that day, at the East Nashville home belonging to his producer Austin Shawn, where he records all of his music, cutting vocals in a closet. “Whatever I want to make that day, that’s what I want to be. Some days you’ll see me in penny loafers and then sometimes you’ll see me in Air Force 1s.” He was indeed wearing Air Force 1s, gray ones. (He started sporting them — he tries not to wear the same pair twice — when his manager suggested he needed to step up from the Vans he used to favor.) He’d paired them with a lightly distressed denim jacket and jeans. His longish, tousled hair was swept back under a black cap with a BZ logo (which he’d later sign and give to the Topgolf staff for a charity auction) and a BZ diamond pendant on a chain around his neck. “You know, I can go to a farm and put boots on and take care of 500 head of cattle and do all that,” he said. “But I just don’t, like, act ‘country’ I guess. You know what I’m saying?” Zimmerman is a modern country star in a hybrid mold. He has a rigorously raspy voice, and sings with power he’s mainlined from his primary influences, many of which are rock acts: Nickelback, Three Days Grace, Foo Fighters and, most crucially, the Southern-rock bruisers Hinder — bands that specialize in puffed-chest emoting. Zimmerman’s favorite band is the melodic hard rock outfit
Tesla. (He recently enthusiastically posted a video online of the frontman Jeff Keith singing the hook of “Rock and a Hard Place.”) At Topgolf, the music was blasting loudly and the songs Zimmerman had the most electrified reaction to were the pop-punk anthem “My Own Worst Enemy” by the sleaze-rock band Lit, and the unruly glam plosion “Time to Pretend” by MGMT. But he is also clearly an inheritor of Nashville’s recent crop of shaggy-at-the-edges superstars — singers like the powerhouse , or the genre’s reigning titan, Wallen, who have collectively iterated beyond the boyfriend and gentleman country of the mid-2010s, and whose songwriting and commitment to genre mark them as somewhat more traditional than the bro-country breakouts of the early 2010s. Shawn said that “the door has been opened” by artists like Combs and Wallen, “even people like and Tyler Childers.” Shawn, who produced or co-produced every song on the album, added, “Is he a country singer? Or a rock singer? Or a folk/Americana
Singer with a little bit of a gritty edge?” Those lines are blurry in Nashville’s contemporary mainstream. Given that pre-existing context, Zimmerman has floated to the top of Nashville’s rising class with remarkable ease and speed. The ascent has been even more remarkable given his starting point. Zimmerman is from Louisville, Ill., a town in the Southern part of the state with a population of just over 1,000 and proximate to not much. (“A two-hour drive to get to a mall to go school shopping.”) His father owned a trucking business and repossessed vehicles; his mother owned the family car dealership with Zimmerman’s grandfather and uncle. When Zimmerman struck out on his own, he took on some of the hardest physical labor available: working on natural gas pipelines in West
Virginia. “The gnarliest most chaotic work,” he said. “Screaming, yelling,
BREAKING stuff. Hard hats, walkie talkies, whatever they had in their hands, they’d chuck it at you. Like, you’d walk home with black eyes, bruises from people chucking drinks on you and just belittling you.” On one particularly unpleasant assignment, he was fired in a series of events that included a coffee thrown in his face, a broken shovel wielded as a weapon and a brawl in the living room of his abode that smashed the coffee table. Even still, he maintains a soft spot for the work. “I was so into pipeline, man. Like, I loved working hard. I’ve always loved working hard. Like, I loved getting my hands dirty and coming home and having
Oil on my face,” he said. “I just felt like, man, there’s no possible way I’m going to ever make it out of this. I’m going to be 65, 70 years old, hips broken, back broken, still have nothing to show for it.” He moved home and began custom building lifted trucks — pickup trucks with super tall wheels — and posted videos about them on TikTok, eventually amassing a respectable 60,000 followers. In his , his hair is prim and short, and he has braces on his teeth. One day in late 2020 Gavin Lucas, a high school acquaintance who wrote songs, heard Zimmerman singing on Snapchat and was impressed. For a couple of weeks, they fiddled around and eventually, on
Christmas night, wrote a verse for a new song. The resulting TikTok changed both of their lives — Zimmerman resigned from his union the following day. Within a couple of weeks, they had finished the song — the rowdy country-rock number — Googled information on how to record songs, and driven to Nashville to cut it in a real studio, splitting the $3,000 cost. (Zimmerman borrowed his half from his mother.) Attention came at a disorienting speed. When Zimmerman first met Chief Zaruk, an industry insider who would become one of his managers, “I thought he was the mayor of Nashville, ’cause that’s how everybody introduced him on the Zoom call,” Zimmerman said. “I’m just like, man, why is the mayor of Nashville trying to sign me? This makes no sense.” But the kismet continued. “Morgan was one of the first artists I ever met. He was walking up to Big Loud just randomly,” Zimmerman said, referring to offices for the label and management company. “And he was like, ‘Hey man, I’m a big fan of your song ‘Fall in Love.’ And I’m like, holy crap!” He continued, “Morgan has just been such a big part of my life since 2015, since 16, ‘Up Down,’ ‘Chain Smokin’’ and ‘Spin You Around.’ All that stuff has just been my life.” Last October, he released his debut EP, “Leave the Light On,” which remains in the Top 50 of the all-genre Billboard album chart. This is owing to his success at radio, but also to Zimmerman’s relentless presence on TikTok and Instagram. He is his own best promoter, and his success underscores how even Nashville, the most hidebound of music industry towns, is increasingly powerless against the tide of social media. Lucas said that Zimmerman’s attitude has been crucial to the speed of his success. “I love how excited he gets and how much he jumps the gun,” he said of Zimmerman’s no-brakes ascent. “I don’t think we’d be where we are today if Bailey wasn’t that enthusiastic. I know we wouldn’t.” “The TikTok and the
Instagram, me doing that every day, that is the brand, of course,” Zimmerman said. “That is the company. And now it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, label, hold on. I now have an avenue of my own to make me successful by myself.” That said, TikTok provides, and TikTok takes away, as seen in Zimmerman’s first true public fumble — a viral video of him singing woefully off-pitch at a recent concert. But rather than duck it, Zimmerman through the embarrassment, apologizing for his misstep and taking his lumps with a sense of humor and as much enthusiasm as when he posts about a new song. “I heard a saying the other day, and I’m living by that now,” he said. “Dogs don’t bark at parked cars.” And so he’ll keep speeding. Sometimes literally, in the white 2023 Corvette with a red interior that he bought in cash after went to No. 1 at country radio, his first splurge. (He also has an even taller truck than his old one that’s in the shop being built to spec.) “I try to keep my sins to a limit, of course, always,” he said. “But of course, dude, I cuss every day. I drink, I smoke, I harm my temple.” And so he’s also taken to the trappings of being a star who needs to perform at a high level — vitamin IV drips, injections of the anti-inflammatory treatment N.A.D.+ and cryotherapy. He’s put both of his parents on his payroll, and is trying to encourage his uncle Brent, whose guitar Zimmerman used to practice on as a child, to become a full-time songwriter. Unexpected things keep happening to him — most recently, it’s the chaotic cross-genre collaboration on the soundtrack of the upcoming “Fast X” film “Won’t Back Down,” with the
Irish crooner Dermot Kennedy and the prolific
Rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again, making for a trio of blood-letter vocalists — but Zimmerman still prefers to operate as if there are no guarantees. He recalled playing one of his first songs for his father. “You need to chase this,” he said his father told him. “He’s like, ‘I wasted my whole life not chasing nothing, man. You need to chase something.’”