Zach Bryan apparently didn’t get the memo.
Just a few weeks after Macklemore was prohibited from performing at Gillette Stadium for making pro-Palestinian statements, Bryan and some members of his band took the stage at Gillette Friday night in black T-shirts reading “Free Palestine.”
The country star did not call attention to the shirt during the show, but fans nonetheless took note, posting about it on social media. The “Something in the Orange” singer will play at Gillette Stadium again Saturday.
Last month, Robert Kraft, the multibillionaire owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, demanded that Macklemore be dropped as the opening act for singer Ed Sheeran at Gillette for saying “Free Palestine!” on stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. (Sheeran’s shows in Foxborough were later postponed due to a storm.) Macklemore was eventually dropped from Sheeran’s tour altogether after Kraft enlisted other NFL owners to ban the rapper at their stadiums as well.
Bryan, 30, an Oklahoma native and Navy veteran who has enjoyed enormous success over the past few years, has not been shy about expressing political opinions in his music. Earlier this year, Bryan released a song, “Bad News,” whose lyrics take aim at the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “This land’s your land/This land mine too/Is this all true, man?/Or is it just bad news?”
The song, which was condemned by then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was written before two Americans — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — were killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis.
Off stage, Bryan has been helping to create a center in Lowell honoring the late writer Jack Kerouac. Last year, the Grammy-winning singer bought a former church in Lowell to house the proposed Jack Kerouac Center and paid a record price for the 120-foot-long scroll of Kerouac’s 1957 novel, “On the Road,” which he plans to preserve and display at the center.
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com.