
Hunter Hayes: “I want to tell my story, but I also want to tell other people’s stories”
The multi-genre star tells us all about his upcoming album ‘Red Sky (Part II)’ and nostalgia-influenced new single ‘Missing You’
Hunter Hayes’ history of storytelling through music dates back to recordings in his youth, including three CDs released in the early 00s, a time when the singer-songwriter still hadn’t yet reached his teens. As his musicianship developed, the hits came rolling in. The country chart-topping, five-times platinum, Wanted, and further Top 5 successes I Want Crazy and Invisible, were backed up by equally impressive albums such as 2011’s Hunter Hayes and 2014’s Storyline.
More recently, he released the studio album Wild Blue (Part I) in 2019, followed by a 2021 extended collection, Wild Blue Complete. This last album included six additional tracks such as No, If I Didn’t Care, and Tell Me. On songs like these, Hayes demonstrates his continued ability to pen tracks in a manner that candidly tells a story while allowing audiences to feel like they are the main character of each tune.
Next up for the five-time Grammy nominee will be the release of Red Sky (Part II), a highly-anticipated album that reflects an adventurous time in the artist’s life and showcases a variety of distinct sounds throughout. Most recent single Missing You, dropped this month and is an uptempo track reflecting on addictive memories. As Hayes sings the thought-provoking yet concise words of the chorus, “I can’t stop / Missing you missing me,” listeners are drawn into the wistful sound and theme of the summer song.
Hayes recently spoke with us about the making of Missing You, what excites him most about music and what fans can look forward to as the release of Red Sky approaches.
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Did your environment growing up cultivate your passion for music?
“I’m an only child and my parents aren’t really musical in any way, shape or form. The more I get to know them, the more I see, ‘Oh, wait a minute, there are elements of musicality all through my family.’ For some reason, it’s not been anybody’s path. Luckily, there are a lot of things contributing to my love for music and my love for creating. One of those things is being an only child. Music was a friend. Music was a very rewarding place for me to go when I was alone. It not only gave me a voice to express my feelings, because I am a deep feeler, but it also gave me something to do with those feelings that was rewarding, that felt like I was making something out of it.
“I was given an accordion when I was four because I was always running around the house and pretending that things were instruments. So my grandmother gave me a toy accordion, because that’s the thing you do in South Louisiana, you encourage the young musical person to get into Cajun music. Then it was a drum set, and then naturally it was a guitar and then a piano. These were all either Christmas gifts or birthday gifts. It was this unending adventure going deeper into music.”
How did your passion develop from there?
“When I was in middle school… strangely, at this age I had been in a couple of studios and was really obsessed with recording. I asked for a little digital eight-track recorder for Christmas, and that’s when stuff really started processing for me. I was not only making music, but I was able to get stuff recorded. I could hear things in my head, but I didn’t know how to make them. So it just started the journey of, I’ll say the studio, but when I say the studio I mean my musical happy place.
“It gave me this whole world to live in where I could dream and build and try and experiment. As I would write the song, I was able to work on it and demo it. What’s really cool is, obviously, we’ve gotten to a place where a lot of people have a very similar process now. It was a combination of that, I’ll say loneliness as an only child, but also just time and energy and passion to really dive into being a part of a song from start to finish. While that wasn’t really a necessity, it kind of was, if I was ever going to hear these songs done. It was just a multi-year process of, ‘How can I complete the circle so that I can live in this world of making music and be by no means self-sufficient, but definitely a world where I could create on my own?’ I wasn’t dependent on collaborators but got to really understand my strengths and weaknesses through being a part of every part of the process.”

Hunter Hayes: “Music was a very rewarding place for me to go when I was alone”
Were there any singers or songwriters who were the most impactful for you as a listener?
“I was kind of listening to everything. My dad was my music curator for the longest time because he would listen to albums for months at a time. I went from Journey’s Greatest Hits to Fleetwood Mac to Percy Sledge to James Brown to Cajun music. We would listen to country radio quite often, because I was a big Garth Brooks fan after seeing him on one of his live specials. I was just a product of all of that music swirling around. When I started studying songwriters, it wasn’t really studying songwriters, it was more studying songwriting or songs and how they were composed.
“You can’t really use all those fancy terms because I was just listening more intently to songs that really impacted me – that happened around middle school. There was this three-album trifecta that happened, which was what I remember as the beginning of my songwriting deep dive. There was a Rascal Flatts record [Me And My Gang] that had Stand, My Wish and What Hurts the Most. When you look at that record, it’s almost an alternative rock/country album, which I think is what I was drawn towards.
“There was a MercyMe record that I fell in love with, Coming Up To Breathe, which was very angsty. That spoke to where I was in middle school: feeling a lot of things for the first time, trying to figure them out and turn them into something. Keith Urban was another one because he was a guitar player and a really vulnerable singer-songwriter. When I listened to him, I felt like I was listening to an individual tell their story, so I really connected with that.”
Were both his songwriting and guitar playing influential?
“He was a guitar player at a time when I was just getting introduced to Jimi Hendrix. I had listened to Eric Clapton for a long time. I was given another two records because I was trying to figure out what kind of guitar player I wanted to be. He was like, ‘Here’s an Allman Brothers record, and here’s a Stevie Ray Vaughan record.’ I loved both of them. I loved the emotiveness of the Stevie Ray Vaughan stuff, but I loved the musicality, harmonies and really complicated shit from the Allman Brothers Band.
“There was a lot of studying happening in that time frame. I started looking for other people who had songs that spoke to me. The next one would have been [John Mayer’s] Continuum, which every guitar player on the planet can reference, and really topic-heavy songwriting. I loved the depth that album brought into view and how commercial it felt at the same time.”
How would you describe your songwriting process?
“There’s a lot to unpack there. I’ve always written songs from a very basic standpoint. It has to stand on its own, lyrically and melodically, with just an acoustic guitar or piano. That’s how I write. That’s the situation I love writing in because there’s nothing more pure than trying to tell a story with music notes and picking the words that make the most impact in the shortest amount of time. I love the challenge of that. I don’t know how to package it, but I know that what I love is starting there.
“Because you start from such a vulnerable place with every piece of storytelling, I think that every story feels like it has visuals, like it has characters. What I’m enjoying about my creative process now is figuring out what songs want to be.
“Every song on this album has gone through three or four phases. One is the demo that we all make together, me and the other writers, for how the song feels. Then, every song went through a total renovation process where I go in and start from scratch, not because I don’t like the demo, but just because it gives me a chance to go nuts and try things. There’s a third phase where I work with my collaborator, my executive producer, and we figured out what we wanted the album to feel like and to look like.”
How does that part work?
“We gave ourselves a very specific set of tools and toolboxes to make sure that the whole thing feels like a continuous story and they’re all connected musically, so that’s more production. I love writing, getting as pure as I can, writing a lyric that feels like it says what it needs to say; there’s a message in it, and there’s a character in it.
“I love going to the production stage. I love figuring out what those characters look like and feel like, and what I mean by that is genres. I love when every song feels like it has its own genre to play in because every scene in a movie is set in a different place, has different lighting and has different coloring or camera angles. Every scene in a movie is so individually treated to carry the message, I look at music the exact same way.”
We think Missing You skillfully expresses the feelings that result from reminiscing about the past, can you tell us a little bit about the backstory?
“I think “synchronicity” is the word I’m looking for [with] how things have been happening. It’s Thursday night, my manager and I are at dinner. This guy keeps bringing up Kevin Griffin, like eight times in the conversation. I know Kevin. I’ve met him. We’ve done shows together. We’ve run around in some of the same circles, because of mutual friends.
“Kevin texted me while we’re sitting at the dinner and was like, ‘Hey, man, short notice, but I’ve got a session with Dan Book tomorrow. He’s a really cool writer that I’ve written with and just wanted to see if you’re around and wanted to jump in.’ I had a show Friday night, the next day. It was going to be my first time playing in front of people since lockdown, which came with a lot of mental things that I was trying to prepare myself for. I was like, ‘I don’t know that I can mentally create tomorrow because I’m going to be trying to create a safe space for me to go back into performing.’”
What happened next?
“I texted him back and I said, ‘Hey, man, I would love to.’ This was our first time writing together and my first time meeting Dan. I was like, ‘Hey, if it’s cool, I only really have two hours,’ which is not ideal. I knew that I had a little buffer on the end in case we were really rolling. For three new writers together in a room, I was really nervous about it, but I said, ‘I’d love for you to come over to my place. I’ve got a little setup and we can knock it out or just vibe.’
“I never want to walk out of the writing session without at least having a song done. You can only capture a moment one time. You can only capture a conversation and the feelings around a topic properly that one time. So they came in and we started on a song. Dan’s a mad science-genius production dude and tore my studio to pieces and put it all back together somehow.”
And then you started writing?
“We started on this one idea because we were referencing all the references that I had for Red Sky: Here are the musical origins, here are the people I studied, here’s the year and time frame that I want this to feel like, and the influences that I have. We started with that, and we weren’t really making a lot of progress. I knew there was a lot of magic in the room, but we weren’t on the right song and we were running out of time.
“We had this line before the chorus of the song we were working on that said something like, ‘I’m missing you missing me.’ I sat quietly for five minutes going, ‘That line has a lot to unpack,’ because it felt like nostalgia. What I connected with was, this whole process of Red Sky is a lot about new, and it’s about exploration. It’s an adventure. It’s about packing all the things you need into a car and going on the road, without the pressure of a plan or a schedule. It’s very much an exploration record.”
It sounds like that line unlocked the song for you all?
“What I realized was, I’d love to write about nostalgia as a vice; like smoking a joint or drinking a glass of scotch. Nostalgia can be an addictive world to live in. I was excited to be vulnerable about it. Even in growth, even in new things, even in trying to set off and go on adventures, there are still those moments where you’re like, ‘Should I be doing this?’ And those moments of, ‘Man, remember when?’
“I loved what that one line said, and I had to get the courage to tell everyone in the room, ‘I think we should abandon what we’re working on and start over with a very small amount of time left.’ They were all totally down, and we did it. Dan pulled up a brand new session with nothing in it. I started playing a thing on acoustic. Dan took it, ran with it, and started building out some sounds. We wrote very quickly because we knew what the message was. The message was, I really miss being wanted by whatever – by this person or by this experience. I miss feeling this and this experience.
“Then it happened very quickly. The song wrote itself in 45 minutes or something. It was a really fun day. I’ve worked with Dan a couple of times since, and we always have fun writing together. It was a song that really clearly just wanted to be written. I love what it represents for Red Sky. I love the place that it holds, and I also love it sonically. It’s a combination of familiar sounds and some new sounds, some fresh sounds that I haven’t really played with before. It’s a really fun combination. It’s like all the history and all the origin story meeting the adventure.”

Hunter Hayes: “I’ve always written songs from a very basic standpoint. It has to stand on its own, lyrically and melodically”
What can fans expect from the rest of Red Sky?
“Red Sky is happening alongside a very adventurous time in my life. As a result, it is the album where I’m getting to approach things very differently, very intentionally and wholeheartedly as my whole self. What I mean by that is, I think this is my first record where I’m getting to play with those things. Every song has its own genre, really, and its own sound and its own scene and its own characters.”
That hasn’t always been the case?
“For a long time I thought I had to be so historically accurate with my music, and it was really conflicting because I love writing songs from experience, but it’s not always my direct experience that writes the best song. It’s the feeling that you have when you leave a movie that really impacts you. You didn’t necessarily love that story but you felt every bit of it. I think that songwriting can be very similar.
“You can get more emotion out of something if you’re not trying so hard to be historically accurate to, ‘Here’s my story.’ I also struggled with, ‘What’s the point of telling everybody my story? Everybody has stories. Everybody’s story is different. Every experience is different.’ Red Sky [is me] busting through walls and busting down doors and totally scrapping the old way that I used to make music and redefining it one step at a time.
“We put a lot of things on a sketch pad and that’s one of the words that we wanted to feel – freedom. Freedom isn’t all fun and games. Missing You is a very fun song about a very nostalgic [topic], but it can be a sad topic in some cases. But that’s the feeling of this album. That’s the way that I’m making it, that’s the feeling I want as I’m making it – freedom. I want you to feel it on the other side, too, when you listen to these songs.”
What does it mean to you when you see your work resonating with fans?
“That’s the ultimate; that’s the dream. That is the light bulb, ‘I can breathe now. Yes, I did something right,’ feeling. Because, again, this all started with me feeling a lot of things and trying to figure out what to do with them and how to make something out of them and also just finding better ways to express them.
“I want to tell my story, but I also want to tell other people’s stories. It’s always tricky. ‘How many details do you put in? How many details do you leave out? How much do you make up?’ The absolute best feeling as a creator is when someone else is able to have ownership of something that you poured your heart and soul into. The fact that it matters that much to them and that it feels like something that is theirs is my definition of, ‘We did it right, and let’s go do it again.’ That’s the ultimate affirmation and the best feeling in the world.”
As an experienced and accomplished artist, what excites you the most about your music career?
“It’s all the stuff I haven’t done yet. I’ve focused really hard on a very specific set of things in my early 20s and my early career. There’s just so much that I haven’t explored yet and so much I haven’t done. Also, performing and playing live, that is the fuel, that’s the lifeblood. That’s the thing that really, truly gives the creator the fire. That’s the origin of Red Sky, the fire inside. It’s that fire inside; let it burn, let it be shown, don’t cap it, don’t limit it.
“Red Sky is focused on, ‘Hey, I know you may have heard some of these things that I’ve done – here are a whole lot of things that I haven’t done yet, but I really enjoy doing as well.’ That’s what excites me. I think every time I start a project, that’s the initial feeling. And the energy that I get from live shows, that’s where the flame gets lit. What excites me is what I get to do with that flame and that passion.”
Hayes’ new single Missing You is out now and will be followed by Red Sky (Part II) later in the year. For all the latest, head over to hunterhayes.com
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