In the space of just over 12 months, country artist Walker Hayes experienced just how quickly a breakout song can change the trajectory of a music career, as he rode a rocket-like rise from club-level gigs to headlining arenas, all fueled by the hit song “Fancy Like.”
Little did Hayes know what was in store when he made what then seemed like an outlandish prediction on stage at one of the concerts he played soon after touring resumed after the pandemic.
“I made a joke on stage one night just because I loved it (“Fancy Like”) so much, I said ‘This song is going to go quadruple platinum.’ And I just smiled. I was laughing,” Hayes said in a recent phone interview.
He had good reason to be facetious with that prognostication. At the time when “Fancy Like” was being readied for a June 2021 release as a single, Hayes had notched all of one top 10 country single in his career — “You Broke Up with Me” in 2017. Four singles had come and gone since with minimal impact.
But three years later, Hayes continues to laugh in wonder, after seeing “Fancy Like” certified as a mind-boggling five-times-platinum hit.
“It’s kind of hilarious,” Hayes said. “My team and my family, we laugh, every time we hear it in a Walmart or a restaurant, you know, it makes us laugh pretty hard.”
The Alabama native came to Nashville with his wife, Laney, in 2004 with the dream of a career in country music, but that was about it. He had yet to write a song and noted he didn’t even know he could get paid for writing a tune.
Eventually, he got signed by Capitol Records, but a 2010 self-titled EP and 2011 full-length debut, “Reason To Rhyme,” made little impact and Hayes was dropped from the label.
Still, Hayes persisted, and five years later, he met Shane McAnally, an acclaimed songwriter, producer and industry pro, who signed Hayes to a production deal.
Hayes got right back to recording, releasing a pair of EPs – “8 Tracks (Vol. 1): Good S***” and “8 Tracks (Vol. 2): Break The Internet” — followed by a full-length album, “Boom,” in 2017. That album, his first under a deal with Monument Records, got Hayes’ career moving forward with “You Broke Up with Me.”
But then, after releasing the ‘8 Tracks (Vol. 3): Black Sheep” in 2019, COVID-19 hit. Shut out from touring, Hayes got busy cranking out tunes that revealed his eclectic influences.
“What my team noticed is, I mean, I’d turn in a different song every day. And they didn’t have anything to do with each other,” Hayes said. “I found that my team appreciated that.”
With that thought in mind, Hayes and his team picked six songs to release on the 2021 EP “Country Stuff,” just to give fans some new music and watched the grooving hip-hop-laced “Fancy Like” take off.
With the blockbuster success of “Fancy Like” in hand, Hayes and Monument then added seven songs (including the chunky ballad “AA,” which relates to Hayes getting sober in 2016 and staying clean ever since) to the six songs from the EP to create the even more diverse “Country Stuff: the Album,” which was released in January 2022.
“AA” is now getting a bit of a second life on a new EP, “Sober Thoughts.” Two of the EP’s five songs — the single “Same Drunk” and “Beat The Bottle” — are new tunes, and Hayes has named his current outing the “Same Drunk Tour” to tie in with the EP.
The idea for the EP came from Hayes’ business team — and it certainly was in character for Walker, who has made no secret of his past addiction to drinking, his ongoing journey of sobriety and his hope that his story will help others struggling with addiction.
“Honestly, I mean, if I write five songs in a week, at least one of them is pretty intensely about addiction or recovery, or at least there’s a verse that hints at the fact that I’m in recovery and will always be in something like that,” Hayes said.
“It just seemed that we had the version of the ‘Beer in the Fridge’ song that we had never released. We had ‘Beat the Bottle.’ That was just a real random, very traditional heartfelt country ballad that we didn’t have a place for unless we had a record like this. And then ‘Same Drunk,’ that’s just kind of your typical Walker (song). I think that song is kind of like a cousin to ‘AA.’ So yeah, with this tour coming up we needed a name, and I don’t know, it was just kind of magnificent how it all just naturally went together.”
Some of the songs from “Sober Thoughts” will find their way into Hayes’ set lists this summer. He said his new show will have a few more ballads to add some flow, after earlier tours had been pretty much high-octane affairs from start to finish.
“We have a lot of magnificent lighting, so I think that will maybe help us transition this year from intimacy and then to the more, just wild stuff,” Hayes said. “It’ll probably be more of a dynamic mood.”
Walker Hayes w/Tenille Arts
WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday, June 14
WHERE: AVA Amphitheater, Casino del Sol, 5655 W. Valencia, Tucson
COST: Tickets start at $35
INFO: casinodelsol.com
This article appears in Jun 13-19, 2024.
