Quick Note: In 2025, at times, I ended up writing for what I imagined our audience might want. I hope to do that less this year. The pieces I’m most proud of are the ones in which I wrote for truth, where I wrote to make sense of my experience in the world. This is one such piece — it’s not as straight-down-the-middle Connective Tissue — but it helped me connect some dots between my own experience and some research I’ve been doing that’s really affected me. I hope you enjoy, and if you’re new to us, please consider checking out some of our other Original pieces, too. Onward.
Last October, I found myself in the Appalachian mountains near Roanoke, VA — in what was functionally a glorified high school gymnasium — to watch my favorite band, The Turnpike Troubadours, perform live for the first time.
A lot of the concerts I attend have pretty good gender balance, but not this one. I sat in my seat and soon realized that I was surrounded by a sea of young-ish men, most ranging in age from their early 20s to their early 40s. Some of these men, like me, had dragged their significant others along. But a remarkable number of these men seemed to be attending the concert alone.
Immediately in front of us sat three solo men: a 50-something — squat, and with a white goatee — sandwiched between two 30-somethings wearing mesh hats and hoodies. My wife and I were actively rooting for them to interact before the show. Talk! Buy each other beers! Anything! Instead, they acted like most of the solo men around us: They made no small talk between opening acts, and they stared down at their phones until the concert started.
But when the concert did start, a switch flipped. To my left, to my right, everywhere I looked: individual men, singing at the tops of their lungs, some with tears in their eyes. We sang about broken relationships and returning home on “The Bird Hunters.” We sang about losing family members to addiction in “On The Red River.” The crescendo came when the band played one of their most popular songs, “Good Lord Lorrie.” All around me, men shouted lyrics of loss and longing:
And I’ve been learning that believing and that barely breaking even
It’s just a part of life for you and me
And I’ve been living with the loneliness, it’s got down in my bones I guess
It’s just another phase of being free
And I’ve been learning how to lose a thing I never laid a hand on all along
Well good lord Lorrie, I love you, could it go more wrong
Well good lord Lorrie, I love you, could it go more wrong
I’ve been returning to this concert experience a lot recently as my friend, Soren Duggan, and I have been doing qualitative research on the relational lives of men without degrees. In our interviews, Soren has been asking open-ended questions about friendship, community, role models, and purpose. Here’s what we are not seeing: the stereotype of the man who is very online, very closed up, and very resentful. Rather, what we are seeing looks a lot more like this concert: a sea of isolated young men, openly expressing their feelings of hurt and struggle, yearning for connection but not knowing where or how to begin.
This is not another “what’s wrong with men?” piece, and it’s not another “here’s how we ‘fix’ men” piece. This is a piece in search of understanding — and I believe one “keyhole” for this understanding is in the emotional resonance of groups like The Turnpike Troubadours and their fellow Oklahoman, Zach Bryan.
“I’m condemned, I’m condemned, oh my heart is on the mend”
The pathway to The Turnpike Troubadours for me — as it has been for many men my age and younger — was none other than Zach Bryan, who counts Turnpike as one of his favorite bands. If you haven’t listened to Bryan’s music, you’ve probably still heard about him: He’s gone from serving as a relatively unknown enlisted sailor to building a male-heavy, Springsteen-level following in half a decade. In an era of “Me More Cowboy Than You” working-class cosplaying, Bryan is a genuine “everyman” who somehow accidentally cracked the algorithm and now sells out stadiums (including a concert with the “largest ticketed crowd in U.S. history”).
I first came across Bryan in 2019, when the YouTube algorithm fed me his cover of Jason Isbell’s “Dress Blues.” My eyes started welling up as I was mid-response to some random emails, and I wondered, “Who the hell is this guy?” I soon found myself down the rabbit hole, listening to his early songs like “Godspeed,” “Don’t Give Up On Me,” and “Letting Someone Go” on repeat. I remember listening to songs like “Sweet DeAnn,” Bryan’s ode to his late mother, and thinking, “Man, this guy wears his heart on his sleeve”:
Sweet DeAnn, I miss you so
And your words go where I go
The reasons? I don’t know
But I’ll sing ‘em loud and slow
So you can hear me from the Heavens
And you can draw my thunder down
I miss havin’ you around
But in my heart, you’re always found
I also remember listening to the opening lines of “Condemned” and thinking, “Man, this guy is hard on himself”:
I’m condemned
I’m condemned
Oh, my heart is on the mend
Nobody gives a damn about me
You can tell me that you love me ‘til your little lungs turn blue
But I’m always alone when I fall asleep
The fact that Bryan has cultivated such a devout male following with lyrics like this is no accident; it’s a sign of his emotional resonance with young men’s experiences. Our interview transcripts with these guys read much less like a manosphere podcast and much more like a Zach Bryan song.1
Like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed aren’t trying to be stoics; they’re often emotionally aware to the point of wearing their hearts on their sleeves:
“I was a mess throughout my 20s. I could not hold it together. Every anniversary of every person in my life who’s died, I was a mess, and it was all going totally unchecked. In the midst of that, my close friends were all casualties. I was just burning bridges left and right … I could not handle my emotions at all, and so I … went on a decade of rampage, just, ‘all right, delete that friend, delete that friend,’ and, now, I don’t have any friends.” - P., 33
Like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed aren’t self-assured; they’re often unconfident, uncertain, and, at times, deeply insecure:
“I have absolutely low self-esteem… That stops me from [making friends]. I’m afraid of just embarrassing myself.” - J.B., 27
Like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed aren’t on the path to self-optimization; they’re often just grasping for something, anything really, to hold onto in their lives:
“I’m just trying to figure out something I want to do in my life that’s gonna change my community in a positive light. I’m looking for purpose — something bigger than me — something that can make change in someone’s life or my life. I’m just here, just passing by — and that doesn’t sit well with me.” - V., 29
Like Bryan, the men without degrees we interviewed aren’t looking to the old scripts of stoicism, machismo, and rugged individualism to live a good life. They’re emotionally open, self-critical (often, overly so), and yearning for camaraderie. And, like Bryan, most of the men we interviewed are grasping for something new — new community, new friends, new mentors, new purpose — but what they’re grasping for often proves elusive.
“I’ve had a couple great friends, and losing them hurt too bad”
But what connects Bryan and Turnpike to their audiences and the men we interviewed isn’t just this emotional resonance; it’s also a shared experience of addiction and its ripple effects. Bryan announced his sobriety late last year after he found himself in a “downward spiral” from drinking. The Turnpike Troubadours took an “indefinite hiatus” in 2019 so that their lead singer, Evan Felker, could get sober before returning to the stage. A young Bryan even wrote a song about Felker’s alcoholism and recovery: “Felker, we need you here / To re-affirm our fears / Felker, won’t you get well / You’ve got stories to tell.”
For Bryan and Felker, the losses that often accompany addiction are personal. Both Bryan’s mom and Felker’s dad passed away due to alcoholism, and both have written about their parents’ addiction and deaths. On “From a Lover’s Point of View,” Bryan writes: “But now’s about the time, look, you really got to decide / Are you gonna be a good man to me or die the way your mother died?” And, in “On The Red River,” Felker’s memorial to his father, he shares:
On days off, we’d help out our neighbors
And we smiled and we sweated for free
You’d earned every drink with your labor
And I’d sleep on your front seat ‘til three
And you’d call it a cure for a snake bite
And reach for a fifth of Old Crow
Some medicine should get your head right
When your symptoms were starting to show
If the shadow of addiction, loss, and the hurt it causes looms large in Bryan’s and Felker’s words, it looms just as large in many of the interviews we’ve conducted with young men. We asked no questions about addiction, yet it has come up in many of our interviews, especially when we ask about friendship:
“Throughout my life, I’ve had trouble relying on anybody, with both my parents being alcoholics. I’m not placing blame, but … they weren’t reliable. I just learned, ‘You can’t rely on other people. Rely on yourself.’ ... So then it becomes harder to start a friendship, because what the person interprets as you being cold and standoffish is just my inability to feel like I can rely on another person.” - J., 43
“I had a couple close friends die from drug overdoses. Then my last girlfriend … the way she was [drinking] was a whole lot different, and I just couldn’t take it anymore.” - A., 39
“If the whole point of a friendship is to get to a point where that friendship creates a bond that puts them where they’re pretty much family … I think that’s like the overall goal, as far as God’s concerned, is that we’ll get to where we’re all close together and rely on one another and look for what we can do for one another … but I’ve had a couple great friends, and losing them hurt too bad. I don’t know if it’s worth it to me to experience that again.” - D., 40
Stories like these of addiction and loss aren’t just incidental to Bryan’s and Felker’s songs or our interviews; they are fundamental. For Bryan, Felker, and many of the men we’ve spoken to, the experience of addiction and loss is what often shatters existing relationships and hinders them from building new ones.
“Come back from the dark somehow”
But addiction and broken relationships haven’t gotten the last word for Bryan or Felker. Both have become the flawed heroes of their own redemption myths built on sobriety and relational repair.
For Bryan, redemption has a lot to do with overcoming his family genes of alcoholism. The chorus of his new song, “DeAnn’s Denim,” includes the lines: “And are you strong enough to stay away from family genes? / ‘Cause DeAnn’s denim was a stubborn thing,” and concludes with, “I cleaned out the closet, found some closure when I threw those old blue jeans on the floor.” Meanwhile, for Felker, the anchor song of The Turnpike Troubadours’ most recent album, “Heaven Passing Through,” is explicitly about his redemption in returning to his marriage and becoming a father:
Now we stare up and I say constellations that I know
You repeat ‘em back, but you don’t care, you’re only three years old
It’s nice to see the world the same as someone
It feels so good to be up late, pretending that I’m young
Like Felker and Bryan, most of the men we interviewed haven’t given up. None of them sees themselves as victims, and almost all of them are seeking some form of redemption, too. For some, it’s in building relationships. For some, it’s in becoming mentors and role models. For some, it’s in contributing to something bigger than themselves.
“The younger generation coming up, they’re lost too. I want to try to give them an answer on how to be a good man. Like, ‘It’s okay to cry; that doesn’t make you less of a man. You don’t have to be this tough guy all the time.’ That’s where I’m at.” - V., 29
“If I was a part of something, I wouldn’t be looking for friends. I could find friends inside of the organization that I belong to. I could always have somebody to go to for advice or for help. I could feel like I always have a team … That’s the bottom line. I just want to be a part of a team.” - K., 31
The challenge is that most of these men don’t know where to begin. They are not rockstars like Felker or Bryan whose words are overanalyzed in pieces like this. They are mostly disconnected men whose experiences are mostly invisible because of their isolation. The connections these men do have, if any, are tenuously held, and the gulf between them and new relationships — be they friends or mentors — feels overwhelmingly vast.
Which brings me back to that Turnpike Troubadours concert. About halfway through the show, Felker belted the moving chorus of “Heaven Passing Through”:
Come back from the dark somehow
Finally living in the here and now
No sign of a thundercloud following you
Don’t take it personal
The world don’t turn around you
Hold on to the moment like it’s Heaven passing through
As the song concluded with those same lines, something simple but profound happened. The older man in front of us embraced the younger men to his left and his right in each of his arms. Then, a brief group hug, followed by a few high fives and a beer run.
A gulf closed. A place to begin.
For the sake of anonymity, I only included the first initial and age of the men we interviewed alongside their quotes above.
I teared up a little reading this. The sad part is, so many men are in the same place and don't know where to begin. Reminds me of a mantra of sorts, "always step first." When you don't know whether to hug a close friend or give a fist-bump, go for the hug. When you don't know whether or not to start a friendly and potentially awkward conversation with the stranger next to you, start the conversation! Eight times out of ten you'll be happy you did. The other two times will be awkward and uncomfortable, but you'll be better for it.
I love this. And I'll say that it was my early-20s son who introduced me to Zach Bryan.