SEATTLE — Zach Top’s phone was blowing up on a recent September morning. The incoming barrage of congratulatory text messages was a little confusing until one included a picture that finally broke the news to the Washington-reared country singer.
Five months after the former Tri-Cities bluegrasser released his first straight-ahead country album “Cold Beer & Country Music” to much fanfare, the soon-to-be 27-year-old was nominated for new artist of the year at the Country Music Association Awards this fall. Top appears in a field alongside other breakout stars like Megan Moroney, Nate Smith, Bailey Zimmerman and Shaboozey, who’s responsible for one of the biggest songs of the year, “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
The recognition from country music’s premiere televised award show, which airs live at 8 p.m. ET Nov. 20 on ABC, is the cherry on top of what’s already been an incredible year for one of the genre’s hottest newcomers.
“Oh man, I was pumped,” Top said a few days after the CMA Awards news came. “Very exciting. I didn’t expect something like that to come along that quick.”
Indeed, it’s been less than a year since Top unleashed “Sounds Like the Radio,” his first single submitted to country radio. The twangy hip-shaker arrived like an artist declaration and personal mission statement from a guy with an old-school country sound that proudly hearkens back to neotraditionalists of the 1980s and ‘90s.
“Hell, I can’t remember the last time a 4/4 shuffle’s been on the country charts,” Top said. “So I figured if I could get one running up there, maybe I would’ve done something for country music [laughs].”
Since then, the purebred country man who grew up on a Sunnyside ranch has passed a number of mile markers that suggest his decision to pivot from bluegrass to country was a smart one.
One of those moments came this summer when Top returned to Washington to play the Northwest’s leading country festival, Watershed, out at the Gorge Amphitheatre.
“It was so funny,” Top said, “I grew up an hour and a half from there or something and never went to the festival as a kid or anything. Shoot, it’s a bucket list venue for almost anybody, I feel like, but especially for me being from so close to there.”
Besides crossing off the bucket list item and smacking some golf balls into the canyon, the Gorge homecoming gave the Nashville, Tennessee-based artist a chance to catch up with family and back-home friends who saw him leave town in “an old Chevy pickup” and return years later in a tour bus.
Before moving to Pasco when he was 10 or 11, Top and his three siblings grew up on a 40-acre hobby farm in Sunnyside, where the family raised horses, goats, a few cows and some chickens. His father worked in the livestock industry and his mother home-schooled the kids in the morning before “she’d turn us loose and tell us to not come back till we heard the dinner bell.” Top, his younger brother and two older sisters would run around the Central Washington property, building forts and playing with the animals.
“I can’t believe one of us wasn’t seriously maimed or killed by one of them raggedy old nags we had around the farm,” Top said of the horses, “but somehow we came out of it alive. It was a fun way to grow up.”
By his own admission, Top wasn’t the best at the actual cowboy stuff, but he fell in love with “cowboy songs” through artists like George Strait, Keith Whitley and the Marty Robbins cassette that took up permanent residence inside the tape deck in his father’s “old blue truck.” (In a “full-circle moment,” Whitley’s old bandleader Carson Chamberlain became Top’s first Nashville connection and mentor after Chamberlain reached out about working together in 2018.)
Top started guitar lessons when he was around 5 years old. His Kennewick-based music teacher Marie Parks was “big into the bluegrass world … so that’s what she taught us,” Top said. By the time he was 7, Top and his siblings formed a family bluegrass band, fittingly named Top String, spending their summer weekends playing classic country songs in bluegrass fashion at festivals around the region.
By the time he was old enough to set foot inside a roadhouse bar, Top had amassed more than a decade’s worth of stage time performing with his siblings, and later, Washington-based bluegrass band North Country. Top, who has a humble-pie charisma, credits those formative gigs with teaching him how to command an audience.
“If I’d had a song blow up on TikTok and then had to go out and book a tour, I don’t know if I’d have known what to do,” Top said. “You got that one song, but what do you do to entertain them for 90 minutes? So, I think a lot of that stuff was really beneficial to me early on and has helped me get where I’m at today.”
Even after Top String disbanded as the siblings dispersed for college, Top maintained his Northwest music connections. While studying to be a mechanical engineer in Colorado, he’d fly back to play mandolin and share lead vocal duties with North Country.
After connecting with Chamberlain in 2018, Top started flying to Nashville for songwriting sessions, eventually moving to Music City full time. Top released his self-titled debut in 2022, a sweet and savory eight-song collection of bluegrass songs, including “In a World Gone Wrong” — a fiddle-stroking, banjo-picking number that traces back to his days with another one of his Washington ensembles, Modern Tradition, and still cracks his set list.
Ahead of “Cold Beer & Country Music,” Top became the first artist to sign with Leo33, a startup indie label led by former Universal Music Group Nashville executives Rachel Fontenot and Katie Dean, and the rest is history in the making.
If there’s any place on Top’s country pivot where his Washington roots show up, besides a casual Seattle reference in “Cowboys Like Me Do” more for “ear-candy” purposes, it’s in the song “Dirt Turns to Gold.”
Over the past few years, country music has grown in popularity, particularly as artists have increasingly dabbled with more pop-leaning sounds and collaborators. It culminated with two of the world’s biggest pop stars, Beyoncé and Post Malone, releasing country albums this year. Another Washingtonian, Tucker Wetmore — crafter of earwormy country jams with a contemporary palette and pop-smart melodies — has also seen his career take off in 2024.
Top, who’s on the more traditional end of the country spectrum, believes there’s ample room for everything from Morgan Wallen to George Strait, but that there’s a hankering for those classic country sounds after years of boundary-pushing.
“I think you get something that’s kind of fresh and new and gets outside the lines of country music a little bit, and people get excited about that and go chase that for a little while,” Top said. “Then it kind of runs its course and we swing back to the middle, where country music has always been. I feel like I showed up when it was about time for that pendulum to swing back a little bit. So, here we are.”
And early indications are that this true-blue country picker with a timeless sound might have serious staying power.
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