Warren Zeiders on Riding a Wave of Country Music Success: 'There's Moments Your Brain Can't Comprehend It' (Exclusive)

The rising country artist's debut album, 'Pretty Little Poison,' is out now

Warren Zeiders is not exactly sure where he is.

“Where were we last night?” the 24-year-old asks aloud from the back of his tour bus parked somewhere in Arkansas. “I think it was Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was my first time being there, so it was a good show.”

It’s no wonder that Zeiders is having a tough time getting his bearings at the moment, as the badass from Pennsylvania finds himself riding the roller coaster towards country music stardom.

And yes, he’s been a badass pretty much since birth.

“I guess that's a good way of putting it,” Zeiders agrees with a laugh during an interview with PEOPLE. “[I was a] daredevil knowing no limits. I was definitely that way as a child. I didn't like to hear the word, ‘No.’ I always had to go do my own thing and go to the beat of my own drum.”

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Despite his wild streak, Zeiders has also loved hard.

Certainly, his first love was his parents – his mom now serves as his business manager and his dad will serve as his ‘merch guy’ while out on tour this fall. But back in the day, Zeiders’ second love was the sport of lacrosse.

“I was hooked on [lacrosse],” he remembers. “You give me an opportunity [and] you give me a chance to sink my teeth into it and I have a true passion for it, and there's no looking back for me. I give it everything I have.”

So, when his future in lacrosse didn’t pan out as he would have hoped after a series of concussions, Zeiders says he found himself on the fringe of an identity crisis.

“I had played [lacrosse] for 12 years and that's what I was known for,” Zeiders remembers. “It was difficult to let it go, but I say God's got a plan for everybody, and I think that all along [music] is what I was meant to do. I believe that more and more each day.”

Indeed, music pulled Zeiders out of a rut that he found himself within a few years back, as the pandemic shut down his and everyone else’s dreams for a bit. After snagging some serious traction on TikTok with covers such as the one he released back in 2020 of Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey,” Zeiders began to figure out how to take his viral success to the stage.

“The first ever tour I did was just me and a guitar player and a 15-passenger van,” remembers Zeiders. “We booked 15 dates, and they sold out in less than 24 hours. At the end of that first show, I knew what the good Lord had put on my heart. I knew that this was what I was meant to do.”

Zeiders now finds himself not only with a blazing hot single in the form of “Pretty Little Poison,” but packed crowds each and every night, with each of them singing each and every lyric back to him.

“There's moments where your brain can't comprehend all of this,” explains Zeiders, who played his first headlining show at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium on Oct. 4, with pics from the sold-out performance premiering exclusively on PEOPLE.

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Certainly, the entirety of Zeiders’ debut album Pretty Little Poison reads like a diary of his soul, reverberating through a sonic adventure of dark twists and turns paired with songwriting that shoots an arrow right through every listener’s heart.

Take, for example, the standout album cut “Weeping Willow.”

“I was on a writing retreat, and it was a nice spring day, and I was looking across the water and saw this weeping willow, and I just kept saying ‘weeping willow’ under my breath,” remembers Zeiders of the song he wrote alongside Randy Montana, Mark Holman, and Erik Dylan.

“I had a cool title, but I didn't know where to go with it, and my boy [Dylan] was like, ‘What if we wrote it from the position of ‘that girl could put a smile on a weeping willow.’ And then we just sunk our teeth into that.”

It's certainly one of his favorites, but there certainly will be more where that came from.

“Every song is different,” concludes Zeiders, who will be out on tour through mid-November. “No one song is made the same. That's why I love music and I love art because you never know when you're going to catch one. You never know what feelings you're going to put out that day.”

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