Songs about failure fuel Walker Hayes’ success

On a day in 2015 when Walker Hayes really didn’t need anything else to go wrong, the roof of his car fell down. Someone on the internet swore thumbtacks could fix it, so Hayes borrowed blue, purple, pink and green tacks from his young daughter, Lela. Together, they went outside and patched up the upholstery. Lela was dazzled. She said they looked like stars.

Later that week, Hayes sat in his battered car in a Nashville Costco parking lot, waiting to clock in for his 4 a.m. shift, replaying a conversation he often had with himself: What, exactly, was the plan here? When he moved to Nashville a decade earlier, he landed a record deal and figured stardom would follow. Then, he lost the deal. And another one. Now in his mid-30s, with six kids, he was barely paying the bills by stocking Costco coolers, writing songs and piecing together gigs at local venues. Realistically, how long could this go on? He stared up his roof, covered in colorful thumbtacks. And he realized something.

“I was like, ‘Man, I’m an idiot. I’ve got it so good,’ ” Hayes recalled: a wife who never told him to give up the music dream, kids who didn’t care that he drove a beat-up Honda. He grabbed a Styrofoam cup off the passenger seat floor and scratched out a lyric: “The sky ain’t falling/It’s just the roof of my car.”

The line became the chorus of “Lela’s Stars,” which tells the above story in raw detail — only one example of work so candid that it started attracting attention. In November 2015, he got a call from Shane McAnally, a famed Nashville songwriter and producer for stars including Kenny Chesney and Miranda Lambert, who previously declined to sign Hayes to his publishing company as a songwriter. McAnally couldn’t see his unique writing style working for other singers. But, after listening to Hayes’ new material, McAnally decided that people needed to hear these songs. And he had to sign Hayes as an artist.

It was a somewhat risky choice, considering that Hayes’ music includes spoken-word lyrics, difficult phrasing, beatboxing, whistling, pounding on tables, and building tracks in any way possible because he was too broke to afford a professional demo. Although he had earned a loyal following among Nashville tastemakers, pitching those offbeat songs to radio — the key to success in country music — would be a gamble.

In early 2016, Hayes quit Costco. A year later, he was announced as a flagship artist for McAnally and Jason Owen’s new label, Monument Records. Eight months later, his first single, “You Broke Up With Me,” cracked the top 30 on the radio airplay chart and is still climbing every week. Last week, his label announced his sophomore album, “boom.,” will drop Dec. 8, more than 13 years after he moved to Nashville.

As Hayes plays concerts and visits country radio stations, he can tell his music is connecting in a way it never did years ago, when he was a fledgling artist on a major label and pressured into releasing singles that were considered “safe.” He would watch as radio program directors’ eyes glazed over.

These days, although his hip-hop-infused sound is polarizing, he has their attention. As he grows his fan base, he thinks what really strikes a nerve for his audience is when he sings about his struggles. Because now, he has a real story to tell.

“They don’t want me to write a song about a Saturday night unless it’s a Saturday night that actually went down,” Hayes, 37, said last month, on the way to an afternoon performance at 98.7 (WMZQ-FM) in Rockville, Md. “To me, that makes the music so much better — I think that’s standing out.”

McAnally reiterates that even though Hayes’ music doesn’t sound like traditional country, his lyrics are authentic tales about real life — the cornerstone of the genre.

“People can complain about production, they can say that he’s rapping, they can say that it’s not the way Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash did it. But what they did do is tell their stories,” McAnally said. “To me, he’s not that different.”