When it comes to innovation and boundary pushing, there’s no artist that comes close to singer-songwriter Walker Hayes.
The Country star made waves with his album ‘boom’ in 2017 and his latest EP ‘Country Stuff’ sees a marked change in direction. The single “Fancy Like’ has become a viral sensation on social media platform TikTok thanks to a dance that Walker and his daughter uploaded, and the song has topped the all-genre iTunes chart in the US.
I caught up with Walker ahead of his Destination Country Happy (Half) Hour, taking place on 1st July, to discuss the success of ‘Fancy Like’, talk about his unpredictability as an artist, and to find out how he coped during the pandemic…
How have you been since we last spoke?
Things are opening up you for us. I’ve had about seven shows now and capacities were good. They weren’t limited at a few of them but one outdoor one was not limited at all. So on that front, I guess, things are good. I can’t wait honestly to travel out of the country. It’s crazy that I can’t travel out of the country, that’s been weird for a year. On the music front things are great, but I’ve truly missed you guys. I was asking some people I’ve been over there with if they were planning to go back and nobody is yet but I’m sure the minute it’s open we’ll be back to fill those bars up.
I honestly think one of the last live shows I saw was when you played at the launch of the C2C that never happened in autumn 2019…
That’s crazy. I will say one positive thing I’ve noticed is a lot of shows that were canceled from last year have been moved. I played one of those on the coast over here and they actually are having two festivals this summer because they just moved last year’s to this year, so that was nice. The people down there get a double dose this year after missing last year. What a crazy year for music. Obviously, you’re in the same boat and we just didn’t see this coming. We all got blindsided with a healthy year of just sit down. It’s sad to say that maybe we took those shows for granted and we took things like being able to travel across the country for granted with such ease. I’ll admit that. When I have had a few shows back, they’ve been quite emotional because it doesn’t take us long to forget what that feels like.
I completely know what you mean. I’m at the point now where going to see a show seems alien to me. It’s something I used to do three to four times a week and now the idea just seems crazy…
Right? I love that. That sentence is great. I think we all, players and singers alike, felt that way, especially the first show for me which was in Nashville, at the Basement East. I didn’t know what to do and I could tell nobody else did. The fans didn’t and you could even tell a sense of a little bit of awkwardness in the entire room because we were all just kind of like, ‘what do we do?’ I’ve noticed that my band and my crew, we have fallen back into the swing. It feels very natural and now we’re really enjoying the high of being back out there, but at first it was really, really different. It was a new experience for us all, which as you said, is hilarious, because we used to do that four or five nights a week. I had to learn words to songs that I hadn’t sung in 400 days and I actually had to rehearse, which is funny because usually with rehearsal we cut up and we hone in on a few things. We had to run the whole 75-minute show and I can’t remember the last time before COVID that we did that together. It’s interesting. I hope many books and many plays and poems and paintings will come out of this because so many people were just left with our thoughts. It’s an interesting time to think and there’s obviously a lot of psychology and things to think about that are going on in our homes right now.
It looks like you’ve mastered TikTok during the pandemic so that’s something…
We’re trying our best to stay true to ourselves and do something and it’s our hope that we have something like this, that you have something that just takes off song-wise or dance-wise. You really just want to wrap your arms around as many fans as you can at one time and just say, ‘hey, get my stuff, come into the museum of Walker songs and look around and hopefully there is something for you and we can be friends for life’. For me, personally, the TikTok thing was completely accidental. So mastered I wouldn’t say that. Did my daughter and I capture some freedom that obviously people are responding to? I think we did that. Now it’s like, how do you do it again? I have no idea what I did. I’ve loved the response to the song. I’ve loved seeing all walks of life doing the dance, that’s one exciting thing to me is that it’s not one type of person gravitating towards this song. It’s all colours, all shapes and sizes, all ages. It’s just crazy. It brings tears to our eyes sometimes when we watch people doing this dance and just having this happy moment right now. It’s really gratifying.
(laughs) I will freely admit, I completely got lucky with that. If you watched my TikTok prior to the song ‘Fancy Like’, it’s pretty mediocre. We do a dance, I hang out my kids, we do some trick shots or whatever, but obviously that song ‘Fancy Like’, just has some type of energy that really took it viral. It’s wild, my daughter and I are really having a good time watching everybody do the dance. It’s interesting, man. It really is super fascinating to me. You saying ‘you’ve mastered TikTok’, the funny thing is just like the music business, if you equated Nashville to TikTok and Instagram, I don’t think any of us really know what we’re doing.
I’ve said to you over the years, the thing I love about you is that I never have any clue what to expect when you release new music. With this EP, ‘Country Stuff’, you’re sporting a beard now, which is new…
(laughs) Right!
You’ve got amazing collaborators in the shape of Jake Owen, Carly Pearce and Lori McKenna. This music feels completely different from what we’ve heard from you before. Was that intentional or a natural evolution?
The unpredictability, I think that’s one thing most people, like you, would predict about me. You see a title and you’re like, ‘I’d love to guess what that’s about’ and then you hear it, and you’re like, ‘whoa, I was way off’. Like ‘Briefcase’, for instance. I can’t imagine what goes through somebody’s mind when they’re, ‘I wonder what that’s about?’ especially coming from me. What happened prior to this EP is over COVID I just went off the rails. I was a different writer each day, and just having fun, because honestly, my soul thrives on writing. That is where I’m the most effective human. That’s where I’m the best Dad and I’m the best husband when I’m able to just pour it all out, continually non-stop. That’s what I was doing over COVID, which is different than when you’re on the road all the time. I rarely get to sit down and just get it all out, so that’s not the healthiest place for me. The healthiest place for me is in the writing room.
As I was writing, one of my my managers, her name is Marissa, we were talking about just how many personalities there are in each human and how it’s so much fun that I get to chase those every day. I don’t have to stay in one lane. I was dreaming out loud and I was like, ‘man, I wish the world could hear what you guys hear. I wish that the world could hear what I turn into my publishing company’ because my publishing company enjoys it. Maybe not every song is for the radio or anything per se, but they love to listen. They gravitate towards these songs that rarely ever see life. One of those songs that my publishing company had been wearing out was ‘Country Stuff’. Finally after COVID Marissa was like, ‘why can’t we just put this out? I know you and this is you’ and then she said, ‘I know you and ‘Briefcase’ is you, and I know you and ‘Fancy Like’ is you’. It was kind of scary because I didn’t know if people would be confused when they got this body of work and it’s so many different things. As you said, it’s nothing quite like the last thing I had out.
I think we just got bold. One, because we were cooped up for a year and two, because we just had a chance to live with that music, and we all agreed, ‘hey, we just love this. If this is you, Why hide this? Let some people get mad that they’re confused that it’s all over the place, but let’s let people who can digest it, get it’ and that’s what prompted the diversity and the change. And you know what, I may not have a beard next year, who cares? That’s human nature. That’s what’s cool is that I think that human nature is displayed in this, as small as this body of work is. It’s my split personalities and I don’t think everybody else just has one thing. I think we all wake up and we’re a little bit different each day.
I really feel fortunate that my team didn’t say ‘hey, we need six songs with a common thread’. They just said, ‘we need six great songs that are you and these are the ones we believe in the most right now’. It’s really fun to see people’s reaction. In a weird way, I don’t know if you feel like this, but I feel like every song on the record makes the other one better, which is really nice. ‘Fancy Like’ and ‘Briefcase’, it’s neat and like, ‘these are the same guy?’ ‘Country Stuff’ and ‘What If We Did’, they live in two totally different spaces but the fact that this guy wrote that, and that guy wrote this, it’s kind of neat.
You are one of the most innovative artists out there, and again that’s something I’ve said to you a lot over the years. So many artists just release the same album year after year, and it would be easy for you to do that but you don’t. Whenever I know you have new music coming, I’m excited because I know it will be boundary pushing and completely different…
Dude, thank you! Thank you for saying that. That’s a testament to my team. I will just confess, at times if maybe a song’s not popping off or momentum is kind of slow, that temptation hits you to maybe dial it in, and just go, ‘hey, let’s just do something safe because I don’t want any hate. I don’t want to ruffle feathers. Let’s just have a career, and let’s just feed the kids’. My team refuses to do that. I have vaults of songs that I think are good but they’re just not what my fan is going to get excited about. My fan is a lot like you, they want to be surprised and then they want to be overwhelmed with some emotions, and then they want to be like, ‘wow, Walker got vulnerable there. Or Walker went crazy there. Or Walker was brave there’. That’s what my fans would like. I think sometimes I let them down if there’s any temptation in something I’m working on to, to dial it back. My team, they don’t force me go outside of barriers, but that’s what they react to the most
Walker Hayes’ EP ‘Country Stuff is available to stream and download now. He will be taking part in the Destination Country Happy (Half) Hour on Thursday 1st July 2021 at 8pm. Register for FREE to attend at https://destination-country.com/portfolio/happy-half-hour-with-walker-hayes/.
