Zach Haines

Zach Haines is a country singer from Jefferson, Georgia who started writing songs because the Army wanted him to keep a journal.

Haines came to the McBastard Studio for a Salty's Live Music session after three separate people told Brad about him. Nick Carlson mentioned him first, Chris Cathers brought him up again later, and a third recommendation arrived before Brad stopped losing the note and booked him. Haines cut a few songs live in the room before they sat down to talk, and Brad kept asking him to play one more.

His grandmother bought him his first guitar for his birthday when he was ten, a little Washburn. He learned about a hundred song intros and nothing else, because the intro was the coolest part, mostly Nirvana and Green Day. His great uncles had a band in the sixties called the Orbits, all brothers, and they won a battle of the bands, so there were always generations playing around a bonfire. At sixteen he spent afternoons at his grandfather's house, where you could hear the garage radio from half a mile away because the man had lost most of his hearing after decades in a plant, and it was always Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. Haines has to feel something before he can write, and he has hundreds of half finished songs waiting for the feeling to come back.

He joined the Army at nineteen and took his guitar with him. In Iraq he bought another one off a guy who was leaving for fifty bucks, and his parents banded together and shipped him a cheap electric and an amp that cost more to send than to buy. He was wounded there and medically retired. When they told him to write a diary he refused, so he put it into song form instead, which felt better. In 2013 he and his wife lost their daughter, and he went back to songwriting because he had to do something. He wrote Burns, about coming home and what he saw in his wife afterward, and sent it to her at work. She called him crying and told him he was an asshole, and then told him it was great.

His band is a sixty year old guitar player, a bass player in his fifties and a drummer around thirty five who is a Baptist preacher. Haines calls them a bunch of misfits and says everybody is past the stage where you post bail at three in the morning. Nashville meetings asked his height, his weight and whether he would consider shaving his beard, which is about where those conversations ended. He plays mostly Georgia with runs into Tennessee and South Carolina, and wants Billy Bob's in Texas, where his numbers are strongest and where his son was born. When he tells his mentor Lee Davis that he is spinning his wheels, Davis asks whether he would rather be digging ditches.