Zac Brown On Sphere Shows: ‘This Is The Most Ambitious Thing We’ve Ever Done’

Zac Brown Band will become the second country act to play Sphere — following their pal Kenny Chesney — when their eight-night residency begins Dec. 5, coinciding with the release of the album Love & Fear.

The band’s eponymous leader says the record is the most personal release so far and it matches with his ambition for storytelling on a grand scale, which the group can fully embrace inside the technological wonder of Sphere. Taking lessons he learned from seeing other acts who’ve graced the stage at the Vegas venue, Brown says his band and their collaborators have crafted something heretofore unseen, even at a venue where the heretofore unseen is a regular occurrence: a story informed by the music of highs and lows, a deeply personal tale of growth and redemption. He calls it “our greatest masterpiece” and draws parallels to The Wall.

Pollstar: How did you first encounter Sphere?
Zac Brown: I’ve been talking to my team about creating a production spectacle. I wanted to do something really big and then in the middle of that, my agent, Rob Light, said “You got to see what they’re building.” I got to go visit the building while it was still under construction and seeing the technology they were putting in and I said, “This is the place. This is the place to do this.” It’s kind of a wonder of the world right now. Going to visit and see it, seeing five shows there since then, studying what I felt was really working, what I wished as a fan that I had a little more of and then how are we gonna tell our story. We’ve been working on it 18 months: the content and the story and the music and the album.

You’ve seen five shows?
We saw Postcards From Earth, we saw Anyma, we saw Phish, we saw the Eagles, we saw U2. There were moments in all of them that were just incredible and things as a fan that I wish that I had a little bit more of. We made notes for ourselves like what’s really translating, what’s really working here and how do we lean into that and then pulling that off. I’m actually in a good bit of the content, which I haven’t really seen. Not just pictures of us, not just live camera, but actually being a stuntman, being dragged on the ground and thrown up in the air and slammed against walls. The storyline that we’re threading through this is something that hasn’t been done there either and it really ties up the meaning of what we’re standing for and what we’re fighting for and what we’ve been through. I hope people leave there feeling inspired.

The narrative of the music tied to the show — was that a vision you had before you went into Sphere? I don’t want to say it’s a rock opera but it sounds like that.
The song “Animal” that’s on the album, that is a straight rock opera song and it’s so fun when you’re building the production for this knowing that it’s going to be presented in such a massive form. We filmed a 40-piece orchestra and we recorded them and we used them on the songs that we really want to have a different light and mood for, but we also have the visuals of the entire orchestra playing. We did a 20-piece choir — one of the best gospel choirs in the nation — singing and we got to film it. So all the things I really wanted to go big on for the album and visually and the release and the all the press, in the process of the album and all of that really merges into one giant event for the night. This is our baby, man, this is our greatest masterpiece so far.

You’ve worked with artists who are all over the place like Avicii and Jimmy Buffett. Do you see this as an evolution of pushing those boundaries again by bringing all these different elements of music that you enjoy together?
I love all kinds of music and to collaborate with people that make music that I love. What you want as an artist is to create the kind of music that you like to listen to but I also have an understanding of our fans. A lot of our album is straight down the middle but there’s some island vibe things, there’s things that rock, there’s things that are going to make you think about your family or your love or love lost. The things that are human that connect us and what we get to do with Sphere is pull on every single emotion. There’ll be parts of the show that are like a horror show, with jumpscares and then going straight into soaring over the most beautiful landscapes you’ve seen with music that fits that way.

Being able to have that environment that’s completely adaptable to pulling on every single human emotion that there is like making people really uncomfortable for a little bit and then there’s going to be the release from that and then going into something really majestic and beautiful. Even the title of it — Love & Fear: philosophically you can break down every decision that you make to those two things.

I assume you spent time at Burbank at the mini-Sphere to see how things are fitting.
We’re coming up in a few weeks to actually watch all the content there. We’re still in nuts and bolts mode. After I finished the album; after we finished the concepts of the graphics, now it’s really focusing on the story and that’s the most important thread and that’s what’s going to set it apart. I remember when Pink Floyd came out with The Wall, I remember seeing how big of a production that they came out with and the story and the movie and all the things that they did supporting that. This is our The Wall.

That’s a big statement.
This is the most ambitious thing that we’ve ever done. It is a mountain to get to execute but we’re getting really close to doing and I’m excited to get to that first night and the release of the full album and the birth of the show and we have a lot to prove.

It’s very different because there’s 160,000 speakers, there’s temperature control, there’s rumble in the seats, there’s wind generators, there’s a four-acre media plane of 16k video and you’re really only limited by your imagination to how you’re going to dial these things in and it’s that push and pull, it’s that tension and release, the good and evil and it’s the things that we go through in life. We’ve never had a toolbox this big, never dreamed that there would even be one in existence where we can do it.

I’ve also been working with Louis Markoya, who’s an incredible artist. He was Salvador Dali’s protege in the ’70s. I’ve always been moved by that kind of art and he painted the album cover. This is a higher level of art than we’ve been able to create.

You seemed to jump in head first with Sphere and say let’s see what we can do.
Ultimately our band is a live performance band – that’s what we’re the best at, so getting to see part of the show as just a big concert where that’s our screen behind us and it’s showing all of our faces and all of our emotion and all the things that we’re doing, it allows us to be the band that we are. That’s something that I was wanting more of as a fan for some of the acts that I saw (at Sphere). Some acts had everything turned off completely and if you’re a fan sitting way up high and looking, you’re watching an ant but the other thing about this building is you can’t dial everything up to 10 and leave it there because everybody’s gonna throw up, so you have to figure out that flow of everything.

Rightly or wrongly, you guys feel like an outside band. You feel like a band you see at an amphitheater, you see at a festival or you see at Fenway. This is obviously a big change. Do you find that challenging?
No, not at all. The reason we do that is because it fits more people that way and you can dial in the sound and the lights. I love those kind of things too but the reason we like to do it outside is you can put two or three or four times the amount of people.

What we’ve got coming up for the tour after this, we can use a lot of the content that we created in (Sphere) to carry this forward and be able to continue the story