In 2014, as part of Eric Church’s arena tour after the release of his album The Outsiders, the rocker masquerading as a country artist decided to invest in a massive inflatable “air sculpture” of Satan that appeared during the performance of his song “Devil, Devil (Prelude: Prince of Darkness).”
When one of the first stops on the tour happened to be in Birmingham, Alabama in the heart of the American Bible Belt, you can imagine the reception for the multi-story representation of Satan was mixed to say the least.
Why exactly was Eric Church featuring a massive Satan inflatable at his concerts? Along with the song tie-in, the devil air sculpture had a Nashville belt buckle, and was supposed to represent the evils of the music industry. But for a one-song gag, it seemed a little excessive. People made comparisons of Church’s Satan mascot to the parody metal band Spinal Tap, and a specific episode of The Simpsons that featured Spinal Tap and a big inflatable Satan prop.
Eric Church’s Lou C. Fer
But Eric Church didn’t feature the devil at his concert due to him being a satanist. He did it to be edgy, to be unusual, to be an “Outsider” as he was trying to sell himself at the time. But even more so, Eric Church did it because he was bored, including with country music. That was very much the theme throughout Church’s The Outsiders era, and into today. Tired of the country tropes, he wanted to make an edgy (in his mind) rock record.
Zac Brown Band just released their new album Love & Fear on December 5th. The album is a weird mix of immature, pot-heavy songs indicative of the ’90s—including an unfortunate collaboration with Snoop Dogg and a slew of unnecessary ‘MF’ bombs—interspersed between ultra sappy, Kathie Lee Gifford-style morning show scented candle positive affirmations, including one with Dolly Parton. There’s also a couple of surprisingly good songs on the album among the weird, incongruent stuff.
To coincide with the new album, Zac Brown Band booked a residency at The Sphere in Las Vegas December 5th, 6th, 12th, and 13th, along with a couple of other dates in January. Leading up to The Sphere shows, Zac Brown couldn’t have been more hyperbolic, saying The Sphere show was his “masterpiece”—not really the new album mind you, but the presentation they’d put together for the massive screened experience.
As part of the almost 360-degree Sphere show is imagery that some are characterizing as Satanic to the point where a legitimate moral panic has set in with scores of news articles and Christian exposé’s about it, dissecting the imagery, and explaining why its scandalous, with one of the prevailing conclusions being that Zac Brown has “sold out for Satan.”
The show opens with Zac Brown singing his silly, self-affirming rock song “Heavy Is The Head” he originally cut with Chris Cornell back in 2015. During the song, a massive skeletal character appears on The Sphere screen, and Zac Brown comes out wearing a crown himself. During other portions of the presentation you also see what looks like a hell hound, people being bonded in chains, and other sort of dark, underworld imagery.
But similar to Eric Church back in 2014, this isn’t Zac Brown’s attempt to usher in Armageddon or to show his allegiance to the Dark Prince. He’s just a bored, post-country entertainer whose heart is not into country music and is tired of playing “Chicken Fried” for the 5,000th time. He’s trying to be edgy. In fact, the skeletal appearance seems to be just as much inspired by The Grateful Dead skull and roses emblem as it is Satan.
Zac Brown and The Zac Brown Band think they’re the modern version of The Grateful Dead. In fact, they played a Grateful Dead tribute concert back in January, with the skull and roses emblem imposed behind them. But trust that not a single self-respecting Grateful Dead fan was in attendance at The Sphere for Zac Brown Band shows. They’re saving their money for the next time Billy Strings rolls through town.
Zac Brown has no sonic compass, let alone a moral one. Since the 2015 album Jekyll + Hyde, he’s pinballed from being a hard rock artist, to an EDM performer with his side project Sir Rosevelt, back to his country roots when that flopped, then to whatever The Owl and The Controversy in 2019 were—a terrible mix of pop-hop and whatever else—to once again reverting back to country/Southern rock with 2021’s The Comeback, with few country fans buying into it because they’d been so whiplashed over the years.
Meanwhile, Zac Brown’s personal life has been similarly mercurial and messy. There was the “hookers and blow” incident in 2016, with police being accused as being part of a cover up. By 2018, Brown was divorced from his wife and mother of five. In 2023, he married model and actress Kelly Yazdi. A few months later that ended in divorce, with Yazdi accusing Zac of all kinds of scandalous things, forcing his girlfriend Kendra Scott to make what some characterize as hostage videos saying how awesome Zac Brown is.
But is Zac Brown a Satanist? Come on. Zac Brown couldn’t be a Satanist because that would indicate some sort of ideological underpinning or salient intellectual principle that Zac Brown holds to, when in truth he seems incapable of coming to such conclusive things.
Since 2015, this whole thing has been less about the Zac Brown Band, and more about the Zac Brown Brand. His core fans love to give Zac credit for being so creative, he can’t be pigeon holed in any genre. Same goes from Eric Church, and the French horn all over his new album Evangeline vs. The Machine. But like Church, Zac Brown is an artist who really doesn’t know who he is, and misunderstands “weird” and “unexpected” as “creative.”
Adding unusual Satan-adjacent imagery to his Sphere show makes just about as much sense as Zac Brown launching an EDM career, or singing “Gucci bag, stacks on stacks, diamonds fill up the champagne glass, Veyron whip, G5 high” in his terrible song “God Given.” And let’s not even get started on Zac Brown’s song “Swayze.” In a strange way, all of this stuff is on brand for Zac Brown because his brand and style is nothing.
The dude is bored. And strangely, Zac has kept enough loyal fans who take his weird forays into whatever suits his fancy as “creativity” to keep his career going, and sell out Sphere shows on consecutive nights. Yes, The Zac Brown Band probably will lose some religious fans over this latest controversy. But ultimately, the moral panic will probably only help his prospects in the long-term. Because like so many high-profile individuals in America, failing upward is Zac Brown’s specialty.
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