Zac Brown Band coming to Iowa Speedway in Newton

The Grammy-winning Zac Brown Band named its latest album “The Comeback,” which makes perfect sense. With songs that lean decidedly country, it’s being considered a return to the group’s original musical roots — an assessment guitarist/keyboardist Coy Bowles doesn’t dispute.

He credited Ben Simonetti, who co-wrote many of the songs and co-produced the album with Brown, with helping guide the band through the making of “The Comeback” and achieve Brown’s vision for the album.

“It was kind of like the original recipe, great songs that Zac had his heart into and the band helping support that with musicianship,” Bowles said in a video interview. “We were trying to sound like the Zac Brown Band, and it really worked.”

While each album has had its own character, Bowles sees “The Comeback” connecting to the group’s early work.

“We would never want to do the same album over and over and over again,” he said.

This latest one reminded him as something akin to doing “The Foundation” again, “but as adults who have all of this experience and everything that we have now” to pour into that second album, released in 2008.

“To me, that’s kind of what this (new) album feels like. And I feel like we weren’t necessarily trying to do that. We weren’t trying to go back and do an album over. But it feels like we just let ourselves be who we are and tried to serve the songs the best that we could, and that’s always been kind of in the driver’s seat of what we’re always trying to get.”

Fiddle player Jimmy De Martini, who joined Bowles for the video interview, feels the isolation of the pandemic played a part in the musical direction of “The Comeback” and the return to the sound that first brought the group success. When the band members arrived to record the album, they had been apart for more than a year.

“It felt so good to see these guys. It felt so good to be a band again,” De Martini said. “I think that’s what lends itself to the old-style sound is we were back together again, and we had such a break and maybe we had taken (things) for granted and we were just happy to be together again.”

In the beginning

The band is one of music’s more unusual success stories in that the group started out as an independent act, with the members controlling virtually all aspects of their career and has stayed that way ever since — only aligning with various major labels to distribute their albums and promote their music.

The band came together one musician at a time around singer/guitarist Brown, who by the early 2000s was already starting to attract an audience in the Atlanta area. Both Bowles and De Martini said Brown’s talent was obvious when they first encountered him.

De Martini connected with Brown in 2004 through Wyatt Durrette, a friend and regular songwriting partner of Brown’s. De Martini became the first recruit for the Zac Brown Band. Bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Driskell Hopkins — a longtime friend of Brown’s — joined in 2005, followed by Bowles, and then drummer Chris Fryar to form the core of the early lineup.

Like most bands of that era, the members of the Zac Brown Band cut their teeth on a bar scene that, in the case of the Atlanta area, was generating several bands and solo artists that would go on to have successful worldwide careers, including Blackberry Smoke, Oliver Wood (of the Wood Brothers) and Durrette.

The Zac Brown Band’s breakthrough came in 2008 after the band had signed to Live Nation Records, followed by a distribution deal with major label Atlantic Records. “Chicken Fried,” a song that was included on the Zac Brown Band’s 2005 independent debut album “Home Grown,” was re-recorded and released as the first single off of the 2008 Atlantic-distributed album “The Foundation.” Within a month, “Chicken Fried” had topped the country singles chart. Three more singles — “Toes,” “Highway 20 Ride” and “Free” all followed “Chicken Fried” to No. 1.

Just like that, the Zac Brown Band had arrived on the national stage. With guitarist/keyboardist Clay Cook joining the group in 2009, the Zac Brown Band got to work on their next album, 2010’s “You Get What You Give.” Released in 2010, it went triple platinum and confirmed that the initial success was no fluke.

The group has released five more studio albums since then, while notching 10 more No. 1 singles and branching out musically from its country foundation to touch on a variety of other musical styles, including hard rock, pop balladry and even EDM and hip-hop.

Along the way, the band added percussionist Daniel de los Reyes and bassist Matt Mangano to the lineup, and guitarist/singer Caroline Jones is currently on board as a special guest band member.

The pandemic interrupted the ensemble’s usual schedule of touring, and the musicians used the break to make “The Comeback.” Now they are grateful to be able to return to a normal tour schedule and to be playing for fans again, like the ones who will flock to Newton’s Iowa Speedway on Sunday for the IndyCar Race Weekend. Concerts will be held before and after the races, beginning with Carrie Underwood before and Kenny Chesney after on Saturday, and Zac Brown Band before and Ed Sheeran after on Sunday.

“We’re playing (some) new songs, which is always fun for us,” De Martini said. ”The newer songs are the most fun for us to play, just because we haven’t played them that much and it’s a challenge. But we have a big back catalog of songs, so we’re able to play a lot of old songs, a lot of fan favorites, a lot of singalongs. And then we can also mix in some of the newer songs — and we have some surprise cover songs that we always like to pull out, too.”

Health news

The band, however, has hit one major bump in the road recently. In May 2022, bassist Hopkins disclosed that he has been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), a progressive neurodegenerative disease that eventually can leave its victims unable to speak, move, eat and breathe. It is almost inevitably fatal.

De Martini and Bowles have been impressed with Hopkins’ response to the diagnosis.

“He’s as good as you could be, getting this devastating news. He’s making the most of it,” De Martini said. “Gosh, you could imagine, it’s about the worst news you could ever receive. And after a quick internal thinking, he has turned it into this fundraising campaign and this new drive online to make the most he can do with this position that he’s in to benefit others that may in the future have this same disease.

“It’s hard on us imagining what he’s going through,” De Martini noted. “We’re brothers with him and we live with him on the same bus and we see him every day, and he’s always going to be the same John ‘Hop’ that we’ve always known, and all we can do is be there to support him. ...

“One thing about ‘Hop’ is, he’s great with technology. So as his body deteriorates, I feel confident that him being able to communicate through technology with his family and with us is going to be pretty important,” De Martini said. “So all we can do is be there for him.”