It’s no secret that the recipe for a great country song starts with a story told by someone who’s traveled the open road and lived many lives along the way. By that measure, Zachary Baker — better known as Avenged Sevenfold rhythm guitarist Zacky Vengeance — has more than earned his place in the genre.
After 25-plus years of hard-charging, multi-platinum success, big creative leaps and tragic losses, he’s compiled a lifetime of material. But that didn’t mean he was itching to launch a countrified project.
“I never had any ambition of doing anything solo,” Baker says while reflecting on Dark Horse, his debut alt-country album. “I love Avenged. It’s like my baby, and I could never abandon it.”
While Baker was steadfast about never straying from the band he helped form in 1999, life had other plans. “Not everything I do as I’ve grown older can fit in the Avenged world,” he says of his primary project, whose most recent full-length, 2023’s Life Is But a Dream…, pushed the group further into genre-blurring, experimental territory.
Baker first fell in love with country during his teens, when he discovered the singular voice of Johnny Cash among the steady diet of punk and metal that dominated his playlists. But his formal foray into the genre didn’t begin until the pandemic. “I was driving with my mom in Oregon to pick up keys to a house I’d just bought,” he recalls. “We were listening to country in a rented pickup truck, and she said, ‘Zach, you would make a great country singer.’ I just kind of laughed.”
Returning home, Baker took his mother’s advice, and the floodgates opened during a period of significant change. One early song was “Before I Go.” “That song is for my two sons,” he says. “It’s about the things I’d want them to know if I were to leave this world. I fucking cried while I was writing it.”
Baker knew he had no choice but to tell his story through his own voice, even though he’d never really considered himself a singer. “I don’t love my voice. I don’t sound like these hearty, well-versed country stars or have a Southern twang. But I figured fuck it, whatever happens is purely for me.”
The result is Dark Horse, an unapologetic collection of 11 tracks recorded and produced by Baker, who remembers the process as a “literal therapy session” full of tears, laughs and wild memories.
The album navigates topics such as divorce, new love and loss while “laying himself as bare as possible” and not “hiding behind big theatrics and packed stadiums.”
Case in point: closing track “Fireflies” was written on an old, cracked acoustic guitar given to Baker by a fan, etched with drawings of the Avenged Sevenfold drummer Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan, who passed away in December 2009.
He explains: “It’s not a fancy guitar or anything, and it doesn’t even stay in tune, but I had this idea for a song a long time ago that Jimmy loved and decided to revisit it. I set up one microphone in the middle of the room, stood back and played the song in one take. I listened to it and thought I would maybe re-record it and get the vocals right, but then I [realized] it was perfect as it was.”
Baker’s connection to The Rev also surfaces on “The Storm,” a gut-wrenching but uplifting eulogy. “It’s a story about my band and everything we went through up until the moment Jimmy died,” he explains. “I never got to fully tell my story. When it gets to the bridge in the song, it really explains the moment of how I felt at his funeral and the finality of it. I put organs and church bells in the song, and it hit me with a wave of feelings. It was then that I realized how magical music can be.”
Perhaps the most healing moment of the Dark Horse writing process came from the song “Star Crossed,” which originally had the working title of “10/28,” the day Baker decided to confront the unhealthy coping mechanisms he had developed over the years, including his drinking.
“Last year, I can remember waking up one day and thinking, What the fuck am I doing? I’m just waiting to die, yet I have the best friends in the world, a beautiful family, the best parents and a girl I absolutely love and adore — but I’m just wallowing in self-pity,” he recalls. “I knew I had to get this out of me, tell my story and shape up.”
From that moment on, Baker was reenergized and gained a “whole new level of appreciation for music, happiness and having the ability to realize that not everything is out of your control.”
He may have had his whole life to write Dark Horse, but the road doesn’t stop here. “I already have enough songs for a second album,” he reveals. “The stories keep coming, and life keeps life-ing. I can’t wait to share them.”