This year’s 68th Annual Grammy Awards featured some big additions to the country sector of the show, including the newly added category for Best Traditional Country Album and the renaming of the Best Contemporary Country Album category.
Given that Washington-native Zach Top is pretty much the figurehead for this new era classic country revival, many joked that the category was pretty much made for him. As the boom of subgenres continues to explode and country music continues to dominate the music world across the board, it makes sense that the Recording Academy felt the need to differentiate between sounds so it could highlight more nuanced voices like Top.
After all, both the Contemporary album and the Traditional album categories recognized very different projects with Jelly Roll’s Beautifully Broken winning in the contemporary category, beating out Eric Church (Evangeline Vs. The Machine), Tyler Childers (Snipe Hunter), Miranda Lambert (Postcards From Texas), and Kelsea Ballerini (Patterns). As for Top, who ended up taking home his first golden trophy of the night thanks to his 2025 album, Ain’t In It For My Health, he joined the likes of Margo Price (Hard Headed Woman), Charley Crockett (Dollar A Day), Lukas Nelson (American Romance), and Willie Nelson (Oh What A Beautiful World).
Obviously, receiving a Grammy is an insane feat for any artist, especially for Top, who is still fairly fresh to the scene. In a recent God’s Country podcast episode, he expressed this gratitude to hosts, The Brothers Hunt, while also admitting that he’s got a little bit of a bone to pick with whoever renamed this year’s categories.
Hilariously pointing out what we were all thinking, Reid Isbell opened with, “It was nice enough of the Grammys to make an award that you could win.” Humbly Top recognized the magnitude of his accomplishment while also joking back, saying, “It feels like you know a little extra special to win that the first year that it was a category. You know, it’s kind of like a little piece of history, I guess, no, for however long, maybe they’ll axe it next year or something, but then maybe I’ll be the only one that ever won that one.”
He continued opening up about the part of the award that rubs him the wrong way, adding, “The ornery jack a** in me wants to say, ‘No, just call mine country.’ Qualify the other stuff if you want, like you know, make the contemporary country category, that’s fine.”
Recognizing that there are different sectors of country music, with the obviously more mainstream side of things, he notes that it’s “exciting and it’s fun that it gets more people in the door to country music.” Yet while Top can respect the modern sound dominated by people like Morgan Wallen and what you’ll more typically hear on the pop country radio side of things, he’s still got that old pawpaw mentality to him that wants to keep country music pure.
Influenced by the dominating voices of ’90s country music like Alan Jackson, Tim McGraw, Vince Gill, and of course, the ’80s with Keith Whitley, whom he notes as one of his vocal inspirations, and even the country greats like Haggard and Jones, there’s an apparent influence of “traditionalism” in Top’s hits. He candidly states, “I got a little ornery side of me that’s you still, I think a little bit of a stick in the mud.”
In the country world, Top’s album does rank among the leading ‘album of the year’ nominees for the upcoming ACM awards on May 17, which could make for an exciting second round of recognition for his sophomore project this year. In the meantime, if you’re in need of some of the soothing pure country gold that Top is known, loved, and awarded for, watch the full episode below for a few cameos of him singing hits from Merle Haggard, George Jones, and Tim McGraw.
Watch here: