Country rock’s rising star Warren Zeiders talks about building his music career, an athlete’s discipline, a father’s love and country’s corner stones
By Katharina Moser
It may be early afternoon on a cold German Monday, but Cologne’s iconic concert hall Carlswerk could not be touched less by the ordinary grind unfolding beyond its walls. Inside, sound checks are being done, light shows installed and fog machines tested. In only a few hours, the star of the evening will turn the cold, factory-like setting into a room echoing with guitar riffs and country tunes and heated with the singing and dancing of his fans. Behind the stage in one of the production rooms, there already sits Warren Zeiders himself, his grey sweatpants and sport shoes not yet turned into his trademark black jeans and cowboy boots, his hair still pinned up under a starter cap that will soon be traded for a cowboy hat. The American country rock singer from Pennsylvania has long become famous for songs like “Ride the Lightning” or “Pretty Little Poison”, which first went viral on social media but have garnered a large personal fandom and significant ticket sales alike.
It is Zeiders’ first time to tour in Europe, and yet his shows have been selling out immediately. “What’s super cool is that the genre is at an all-time high right now, not just in the US, but across the globe. And since putting music out, my overseas numbers have always stood out tremendously. Whether it’s in Canada, whether it’s over here in Germany, whether it’s in Australia, it’s been crazy to see just how my music has touched so many people outside the US. That’s why it was such a pivotal time for me to come over here on a tour before we go back and headline in the US”, says Zeiders. The 25-year-old athlete turned artist started out by releasing song covers on Tiktok during the pandemic but soon realized that both his talent and his reception by his listeners called for more. In 2021, he moved to Nashville and released his first EP 717 Tapes. Now, his online following has translated into a massive fan community, and his stories of the American man into cultures worldwide. “I think that I owe all my success to my good Lord and my faith. But I also attest a lot of my success to my fans. They’re the ones that have chosen me in the day and age right now, where there is so much competitiveness on social media. You got to be able to pierce through and stick out in a way is authentic, and I’ve just been able to connect and resonate with them”, Zeiders explains.
Part of his success is attributed to the revival of country music worldwide, which has seen a surge in popularity and cultural impact as seldom before. In Zeiders’ view, country has come a long way – from the 80s and 90s with George Strait, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, all the way back to Johnny Cash and George Jones, to its evolution shifting into the early 2000s. “The bro country, if you want to call it that, has evolved in many ways. I like to say it has expanded. People say, oh man, country’s gone mainstream, but I believe country has opened its arms to reach a larger audience. And the reality is that we have shone a light on the genre and popularized it. It has brought in people that weren’t country fans before, or city people, who now can feel like they have a chance to buy into it”, Zeider ponders. “I feel that country, for a long time, had a lot of red tape around it: if you’re not this way, you can’t be a part of our clique. For me, growing up back in Pennsylvania and coming to Nashville, people asked, where’d you find a country guy from Pennsylvania? Well, if you’ve ever been to Pennsylvania, it’s nothing but country, minus two large cities. Yet, I’ve had to deal with coming into the country scene as an outsider.” With the streaming success Zeiders has had, he has long arrived at the heart of the country genre and its outreach. But he also likes to include new styles and rock sounds in his music, guiding the genre into a new direction. “Country, for me, means to always evolve, always expand, and at the same time my roots will always be with my mom listening to Garth Brooks and George Strait in the house growing up, and my grandfather, who I grew up hunting and fishing with. It’s a way of life, but I like how inclusive it’s becoming.”
All the while, Zeiders embodies two cornerstones in his life story and artistry that could not be more country in its traditional cultural conception: family and faith. “I was raised in the church. I think my faith attests to a lot of my success. I think that my voice and my natural ability for music are a gift from God”, Zeiders is convinced. And then, his parents: “My dad’s out here on the road with me as we speak. He’s my ride or die, my best friend, my number one fan, and he was always pushing me from a young age. I always found a balance of love and tough love in my household, and that is something that I really value as a man: they knew when to tell you I love you, but they also knew when to tell you, get off your ass and stop crying about it. The world does not care, just keep moving forward”, Zeiders recounts. Before writing music became his passion and life content, he was a lacrosse player at college in Maryland until an injury ended his professional career. Who he is as a person, Zeiders emphasizes, is entrenched both in his athletic past and in the relationship he has with his dad. “To answer what built me and shaped me as a man, I always go back to my father. Playing lacrosse on college level, I faced a lot of adversity along that way that has shaped me and built me to be able to go on stage night after night and deal with the love, but also deal with the hate. Not everyone’s gonna love you in this life, not everyone’s gonna like you, but I am who I am. Take it or leave it”, Zeiders says. “I broke my collarbone and snapped off my arm on the field once. My dad comes out on the field, he doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He loves me, but he comes out and says to my trainer, can he still play? If you ask me what shaped me, it’s that. It’s being a kid, and it’s riding my bike and doing something he said not to do, and hurting myself and him just letting me lay out there in the pain. And this is not telling you that my dad was a bad dad, but this was the way of learning those lessons”, Zeiders recalls. “There is not always gonna be someone to pick you up, and you have to get up yourself. Get knocked down nine times, get up then times. Every day is going to be different. Every crowd’s going to be different. Not every song is going to be a hit. It may not connect and resonate. But guess what? It could be one fan’s favorite song, and that’s who I’m writing for.”
Meanwhile, his athletic background, he is convinced, has had a hand in shaping his work ethic, motivation and drive for success. “I was an athlete my whole life. Discipline and work ethic are the baseline of what I’ve been able to achieve and build so far. I’m a determined individual, and after just four years of making music and three years of touring, I have had the ability to build what I like to call a cult fan base, fans for life.”
However, Zeiders does not agree with people calling his pathway as an artist an example of overnight success. “People look from the outside and call it that. But the reality is that I was working my entire life to get to this point. I might have not been playing in bars. I may not have been writing music my entire life. But my upbringing has laid the groundwork for my success as an artist – the 4am wake-up calls to go hit the field and work out in the morning, then to go back to sleep, then go to class, then hit my second workout, then go to practice, then to then go to study hall with your team, and then go eat dinner. These were the disciplines that I built to callous my mind, and they have brought me to this. I’ve put them into place in what I do now”, Zeiders explains. “I’m not living the so-called rockstar life. I’m the dude that plays the show, showers up, throws on comfy clothes, hops on his tour bus, watches a movie and makes sure that I’m well rested for the next day and the next show. I got my eyes on the prize.” In that sense, Warren Zeiders, the man with long flowing hair and well-trained abs who throws off his t-shirt mid-show to screaming fans, cowboy hat a mysterious black and the boots with spurs, in reality resembles a different kind of star image: less the one tumbling wildly into the magic of music and giving his life over to the ecstasy and destructivity of expression, and more the disciplined kind – hard-working, prepared, calculating, someone ready to reap the fruits of hard work and diligence, which again might be as country as it gets.
Since his initial singing success on tiktok, Zeiders has indeed put the work in. After fans had asked him to start writing his own songs, he decided to jump into the cold water. “I went to Guitar Center one night with the money that I had at the time. I bought a microphone and an interface. I soundproofed my old Xbox room in our family home back in Pennsylvania and I got to writing. Then I recorded the song in one take on a free software that I found online and just uploaded to YouTube”, Zeiders recalls. This song reached the ears of one man who decided that Zeiders might just be what the country world needed. His manager today, he invited Zeiders to Nashville to record more songs. On his second day in Nashville, the 25-year-old ex-athlete and fresh college dropout wrote “Ride the Lightning”, which now has over 160 million streams on Spotify alone. “This was one in a million. You don’t just go to Nashville and write your first hit song”, Zeiders says with a big smile. His manager did not even want him to release that song, at first. “He said, you can’t release your first song you write in Nashville. We have to write a hundred more. But I said, there’s something in this song, just trust me. So I posted it on social media, just me singing it acoustically, and it did okay. I thought, dude, there’s something here. So I went ahead and recorded it, and we were not ready for what was about to come. I posted it and the first video was already at four million views on Tiktok, which made me realize this is something that people want. So we got it mastered. We spent $10 on a mastering program online, not even getting it professionally mastered. It’s a ten-buck one-take of me singing it on the guitar in the studio by myself with one audio engineer. Then we released it, and it was like lightning in a bottle. That spark hit, and half a year later I had a record deal.”
His decision to drop out of college and move to Nashville with nothing but a guitar, his songs ideas, faith and a dedication to hard work may have been a tough decision at that time – but standing in front of thousands of fans, it has paid off more than he would have ever dreamt. “Everything you want to know about me is this: I’m 25 years old. The success that I’ve attained has everything to do with being baptized by fire, and it is me growing as a man and growing as an artist in real time in front of everybody’s eyes. I went from a guy who was in college, not planning to do any of this, to seeing things spark. I dropped out, I put everything I had into this. And I’m a person who does not have a plan B. This is plan A. You put everything into it, and you go full force.”
What Zeiders does not have in year-long experience, he makes up with confidence. “I will bet on me every single day of the week, because no one’s gonna work harder than me”, he says. “You got to keep writing, keep perfecting that craft. Figure out what you’re feeling, what’s going to connect and resonate, be authentically you, and just keep putting out music, consistently. Continue to show your face on social media, continue to pay attention. Listen to the fans. What are they wanting?” What his fans want, it seems, is exactly what Zeiders is giving them – love songs and heartbreak songs, songs about relationships and betrayal. “I’m very open and very vulnerable with people that I do not know, but that is the best way to do it in a world where people are looking for authenticity more than ever”, he says. “Social media is so obscure and you never know what is real and what is fake. People want that authenticity, and they want the look behind the scene. That’s why I’ve built a cult fan base – because I’m showing you behind the curtain. I’m giving you a piece of myself every single night. When I get on that stage, I am pouring myself out to you. It’s my goal to get up there and make you a fan for life. Buy into not just the music, but buy into me as a person.”
With that, Zeiders is ready to keep building his career. After the albums “Pretty Little Poison” in 2023 and “Relapse” in 2024, he will release the double album “Relapse, Lies and Betrayal” this March. Love and heartbreak remain the guiding themes of his storytelling, and it is these songs that resonate especially with his fans that fill the Carlswerk in Cologne tonight. As the lights go out and the sounds explode, Zeiders stands on stage, his long hair now falling freely, cowboy boots firmly on the ground and the cowboy hat a sign of kinship to the country community that spans across the globe. Where to, Warren Zeiders? “Stadiums, baby!”, he says, and grins.
The Wrapper 