Zach Schmidt has been waiting for this moment. His second full-length album ​Raise A Banner (out on April 16) was recorded and slated for a 2020 release but shelved along with so many other projects from artists around the world. Despite the delay - perhaps in a silver lining moment - the album’s themes are now more apropos than ever: fighting through hardship, searching for truth in a world of lies, enduring personal loss.
Produced by Sadler Vaden at Nashville’s Creative Workshop, ​Raise A Banner​ is a long-jumper’s leap forward for Schmidt and an exclamatory flag-planting of a commanding voice in the Americana genre, establishing him amongst the ilk with whom he recorded. Backing him throughout the album is Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit (Jimbo Hart, Chad Gamble, Derry Deboria, and Vaden, with Isbell even contributing electric guitar on the barn-burning Foregone Conclusion), and longtime contributors, vocalist Jackie Berkley and pedal steel wingman Adam Kurtz.

Bringing a blue-collar sensibility from his Pittsburgh upbringing to a Nashville Americana sound, the mix is gritty yet refined, emotional but unwavering, and reflective while forward-looking. The songwriting of ​Raise A Banner​ runs the gamut of life experience: “Foregone Conclusion” is the soundtrack for ripping it up with friends on a Friday night at your local honky-tonk, “You’re Still On My Mind” pairs well with emotionally hungover Saturday mornings, and tunes like the album-titled folky groove invite quiet head-nodding while pondering the hypocrisy of Sunday morning religious virtue signalers.

“The record ​Raise a Banner​ was written from a place of uncertainty,” Schmidt says. “Uncertainty of the world that surrounds us in hopes that this album can tell stories of the broken in order to bring light back to dark times.”

“I Can’t Dance”’s slow-rolling Southern rock will shake some dust off the boots of Drive By Truckers and Springsteen devotees; the warm, punchy, warbly Hammond B3 organ is a perfect sonic metaphor for Schmidt’s big, oaky timbre throughout the album. It’s tunes like “You’re Still on My Mind” and “Back Around” - when an acoustic guitar and keys combo or simply acoustic and vocals accompaniment - that one can isolate the potent creative and soulful range of Schmidt’s voice.

Like some moments in life, on ​Raise A Banner​ sometimes it takes the pauses and the quieter moments to balance the effusive; when you really have to listen for you to hear the power of what’s being said. Raise A Banner is that silver lining moment for Zach Schmidt.