Review and setlist: Zach Bryan’s rain-soaked and thunderous ‘Quittin’ Time’ tour stop at the Linc

The 60,000 or so Zach Bryan fans who packed Lincoln Financial Field on Tuesday were already plenty stoked to see the rapidly rising country superstar in the first of two midweek stadium shows on his former home turf.

But by the time Bryan actually came on — walking on stage with his band in a driving rainstorm, as a recording of Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” played — they were downright ecstatic.

That’s because the start of Bryan’s set was delayed by 75 minutes due to severe weather — and plenty of lightning in the sky — with the crowd waiting it out, packed under cover on the concourses. That was after the openers, the Turnpike Troubadours, fittingly played songs from their album A Cat in the Rain.

As that delay stretched on, hopes that Okinawa-born and Oklahoma-raised Bryan would be able to perform grew dim, and fans who had trekked to the show from as far away as Virginia and Connecticut resigned themselves to the likelihood that the best they could hope for was a refund.

And then — voilà! — the word went out on video screens and social media feeds that the severe weather had moved on. Bryan would be able to play after all, and the evening began to feel like a bonus. What’s a little rain to put up with, when a few minutes ago you weren’t sure you were going to see your favorite singer at all?

So the crowd — wearing cowboy hats, truckers caps, and plastic rain ponchos — who were going to sing along to every word anyway — sang along that much harder.

That meant joining the raspy voiced country and rock singer and former Philadelphian on the opening “Overtime,” about his carpe diem drive that derives in part from the death of his mother from heart disease in 2019.

“I lost my family to a bad disease,” he sang. “I got a mean, mean gene in my family tree.”

He followed that with “American Nights,” a song from his new album, The Great American Bar Scene, that merited prominent placement on the rain soaked-evening, in celebration of “wet, hot American nights / shake your body dry under coastline light.”

Bryan’s rise in recent years has been swift, and all the more impressive because his music is so unvarnished. He’s now more popular than pretty much all his bro-country competition, whom he easily outclasses with a poet’s soul and a surfeit of ideas, many of which came into being when he lived in what he called “the great city of Philadelphia,” from 2021 to 2023.

“I’m playing all these songs,” he said on Tuesday. And I’m realized how many of them I wrote right here.”

Among those were “Burn, Burn, Burn,” hardly a cheery number about a flame that is destined to be snuffed out, and the Bar Scene title cut, which was presumably inspired by Center City’s McGlinchey’s, Bryan’s favorite watering hole.

Two years ago, when the country singer was still living in Fishtown, he was the third act on the bill in Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival. Last year, fueled by the success of his 2022 album American Heartbreak, Bryan played two sold-out arena shows at the Wells Fargo Center.

And this year, the prolific songwriter moved up to two nights at the Linc, the only artist to command an audience that large in Philly this year. (Springsteen is doing two nights at the smaller Citizens Bank Park this month, and Bryan’s country contemporary Luke Combs played the Linc twice last year, with one date similarly rain delayed.)

Bryan and band began their set shortly after 10:30 p.m. and played straight on till 12:20 a.m., relying on nothing more than their leader’s sturdy songs and one giant video screen in terms of spectacle.

After closing with “Quittin’ Time,” they returned for one-minute hootenanny on “Revival,” which they performed on a second stage at the other end of the Linc, complete with sawing fiddle and group-sung choruses, and fireworks going off in the wet American night.

Here’s the set list for Zach Bryan’s “Quittin’ Time” tour stop at Lincoln Financial Field on Aug. 6, 2024.

“Overtime”

“American Nights”

“Open the Gate”

“God Speed”

“The Great American Bar Scene”

“Fifth of May”

“Tishomingo”

“Nine Ball”

“East Side of Sorrow”

“28″

“Tourniquet”

“Oklahoma Smokeshow”

“Dawns”

“Heavy Eyes”

“Bass Boat”

“Pink Skies”

“Heading South”

“I Remember Everything”

“Hey Driver”

“Burn, Burn, Burn”

“Quittin’ Time”

Encore

“Revival”