Brett Resnick has spent years as the pedal steel voice behind Kacey Musgraves — the player she calls “Smokin’ Brett” — but Wednesday night at Star Rover Sound in Germantown, he stepped out front with his own band, The Surgeon Generals. The room, built to evoke a 1970s West Texas venue, was made for exactly this kind of show.
The set was a deep pull from the honky tonk canon: Hank Cochran’s “A-11,” Conway Twitty’s “Fifteen Years Ago,” a reading of “Right or Wrong” done in the George Strait mode, and Whitey Shafer’s “I’ll Break Out Again Tonight.” Songs about jukeboxes, old loves, and the particular stubbornness of grief — the stuff the genre was built on. Resnick’s steel carried them all, clean and unhurried, and the night got an extra charge with performer Zachariah fronting the band with his rhythm guitar and vocals. His delivery fit the material like it had been written for him, and the two found a tightness together that the room clearly felt.
What Resnick brings to a front-of-house set is the same thing he brings to anyone else’s stage — he plays for the song, not the room, and trusts the room to come to him. At Star Rover, they did.
The same Zachariah who guested at Star Rover headlined his own set at Chief’s on Broadway the following day, June 4, with his full band the Nashville Counts. Zachariah is not strictly a covers man. His 2022 album Local Bar Opry Star — produced by the late Jimmy Capps, the Grand Ole Opry guitarist known as The Man in Back — is built entirely from original songs, and it sounds like it was recorded about sixty years too late, in the best possible sense. Capps brought in Chris Scruggs on steel and Charlie McCoy on harmonica, and the record sits comfortably in the classic honky tonk tradition without being a museum piece. Songs like “Final Stages of Hank” and “The Drinkin’ Song” deal in the kind of subjects the genre has always handled best — longing, excess, and the morning inventory. That he can step into a Resnick set and hold his own on Hank Cochran and Conway Twitty tells you something, but so does the fact that he’s writing material worth standing next to those songs.
They are playing a string of Wednesdays at the Star Rover so make sure you catch one of the shows this month.
Find Brett Resnick at soundbetter.com and Zachariah Malachi at zachariah-malachi.com.
A curated pick by Planet Mars Music Editorial Staff and crafted with the help of AI