Walker Hayes Struggled to Write Current Single, ’90’s Country’

Walker Hayes’ current single, “’90’s Country,” was co-written by Hayes, Shane McAnally and songwriter LYRX, as a way to highlight many of the big hits from that decade. But although the song sounds light-hearted and simple, Hayes admits it was a struggle to create.

The tune references 22 hits from that era in under three minutes, including songs by Sammy Kershaw, the Dixie Chicks, George Strait, Alan Jackson and more – an arduous undertaking for the three writers.

“I always feel when people ask me about it, that they expect a pretty easy answer, but I’m telling you, this song was hard to write,” Hayes told PopCulture.com. “For one, there’s too many songs that Shane and I loved to fit in to just a three minute nice little nostalgic piece of material, but we wrote it. I started this song actually with a girl named LYRX. She’s a great writer. And, she and I started this song about two years ago and it was a competitor for the album ‘boom.’”

“It could have been on there; we had about a verse and a chorus, and we actually tracked it, but just didn’t think it fit right with everything else that we had on that album,” he continued. “But, I knew eventually we would try to finish it, and tackle it, and we definitely had single in mind, that we would release that song. And, after the summer, after ‘Craig’ and ‘You Broke Up With Me,’ I was trying to decide what to do. Do I go with another song off ‘boom.’ or do I want to start a new album?”

“’90’s Country” is the debut single from Hayes’ upcoming, still-untitled sophomore record.

“Of course, starting a new album excited me,” Hayes reflected. “I love anything new and my favorite song is always the one I wrote yesterday. And so, we pulled out ’90’s Country’ and Shane and I went to work, and we struggled. We fought. I mean it was such an interesting song to write because I am used to just pulling from the well of my soul. What do I feel? How did the event go down? Let me just write that and make it sound cool, and be fun to sing.”

“Not in this case,” he added. “There’s only a few rare moments where I speak freely and the lines are truly just mine. Basically I had a pool of references that I needed to use or wanted to use and I wanted to tell a story at the same time. So, that made this song extremely difficult to write. There’s about ten versions of this song no one’s ever going to hear and it used other references, that again I’m sad they didn’t get in there.”

The Alabama native felt the added pressure of knowing “’90’s Country” would be the introduction to his sophomore record.

“I’ve never written a song where I knew this is going to be my next single before it was finished,” Hayes explained. “So, that made it tougher to finish, when you have those parameters restricting every single decision you make. I’m actually kind of fascinated with what we finished with. When I hear it, it definitely, I think this is amazing. I love it. I’m proud of it. I love the references, the references make me and friends from my generation smile.”

Download “’90’s Country” on iTunes.

Photo Credit: Getty images/Scott Legato