Zach Bryan has attended a couple of country music's biggest awards shows, but he skipped this one. No reason was provided, but he skipped last year, too, and missed the all-genre PCAs earlier in 2024.

Springsteen said that Bryan has been “connected to the country genre,” but also noted that after attending one of Bryan’s shows, he saw “so much — and I don’t want to call it rock — just energy in your performance. You bust all those different genre boundaries down.”