Bruce Springsteen and Zach Bryan

Originally posted at: chenmark.com/weekly-thoughts

We’ve been fans of Zach Bryan since being introduced to his song?Motorcycle Drive-By?in?Season 5 of the hit series Yellowstone.? His songwriting is sharp, intelligent, and captivating (not to mention prolific!).? Clearly, others agree, as he has?since sold over 30 million albums and singles.? As such, we were psyched to see a recent?Rolling Stone interview with Bryan and his longtime hero, Bruce Springsteen.? It seems almost unfair to put that much songwriting talent in a room together!?

While singer-songwriters like Springsteen and Bryan are global celebrities, they are not one-man shows; both are accompanied by bands who are a big part of their successes.? One snippet on this topic in the Rolling Stone article piqued our interest:?

Springsteen: The band is really good. So I was curious where your band came from.

Bryan: So we have the same story, essentially the hometown thing. It was a really hard process getting out of the Navy.? I didn’t even want to get out.? But I get home and I call all my best friends from high school who had put all their instruments down, and I’m like, ‘Hey, guys, I need a band, and I don’t trust anybody.? I trust you guys. You guys can barely play a few instruments.’?One of my best friends quit his job as a teacher.? Another quit his job as a metal technician.

We got in my truck and drove to the Iowa State Fair and played our first show.? It was the most terrifying experience of my life.? Because we didn’t even rehearse.? We’re just like, ‘Let’s do this.’?And my fiddle player, I tweeted out one day, in all caps, I go, ‘I need a fiddle player.’?I’m sure that’s not how you got your band members — tweeting, right?

Springsteen: I put an ad in the newspaper! The interesting thing that you said is that you needed people you could trust. More than you needed somebody who was a professional. That was the same thing. My guys all came out of Asbury Park. It was the guys I’d known for years. They were people I felt comfortable around. They were people who I knew I could be myself around. And they were people who I knew would keep me being myself and wouldn’t let me get away with it.

A lot of effort goes into creating and sustaining great teams (heck, there are whole business school classes on the topic, not to mention countless books and podcasts!).? What’s interesting is that neither Bryan nor Springsteen, some of the greatest musicians in the world, ever focused on picking the most talented musicians to be in their bands.? As Bryan noted, his guys could barely play.? Instead, they built their teams based on who they could trust; people who could give candid feedback; people who would stick with them through thick and thin. Now, in our opinion, that’s how world class operators actually pick a team; that’s how you build?a seamless web of?deserved trust.

Have a great week,

Your Chenmark Team

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