Zac Brown Band’s Uncaged is the 2013 Grammy winner for Best Country Album!
“I want to thank all the people who help us to do what we do, our whole team. I want to thank all of country radio, Southern Ground, all our folks back home,” frontman Zac Brown said, fighting back tears as he accepted the gramophone. “To all my guys who backed me up, and backed my playing no matter what it was … much love to everybody who supports us. Our fans. Our family. We love you.”
Zac elaborated backstage after the win, saying of his team, “Everything we do runs on love.” He further expressed his band’s love for their experiences at the Grammys every year. “It means more to me than I can speak or say … This whole weekend has been a dream for me. It feels like I’ve been hanging out with my entire CD collection.”
So far, ZBB’s chart-topping Uncaged has spawned the hits “Goodbye in Her Eyes” and “The Wind.” Zac co-wrote 10 of the album’s 11 tracks, putting a lot of focus on how each would sound during the band’s live show, rather than worrying about what fits in on country radio. “We’re not just going to take some songs from a focus group in Nashville where people are sitting around in a circle having appointments trying to write catchy songs so they can sell them to a band like us,” Zac told The Boot. “You can tell all our songs come from us and from our artists, the people we write with and travel with. You can hear us in them and you can hear the chemistry in our band because we live together as a band. I don’t think a lot of bands and artists work as hard as we do on the creation, on the writing, the arrangements and the recording in our format.”
Zac Brown Band’s latest project triumphed over albums by Miranda Lambert, Hunter Hayes, Jamey Johnson and the Time Jumpers for the Best Country Album Grammy. This is the Georgia-based band’s third career Grammy win, following a 2010 win for Best New Artist and 2011 win for “As She’s Walking Away.”
“We’re here to prove the ‘New Artist Curse’ isn’t true. We’re really just getting started,” Zac insisted. “We’re finding our own way and getting inspired. It couldn’t be more of a privilege to win another Grammy.”
