ABC/Image Group LANewcomer Walker Hayes can’t help but appreciate the irony: He’s enjoying his first top 15 hit with “You Broke Up with Me,” a song written about being rejected by the establishment in Nashville.
“You know, it’s about fair-weather friends,” he explains. “I’ve been in this town a long time. When I lost my previous record deal, I lost a lot of contacts. People were very slow to email me back, call me back, and I understood why.”
But Walker says when he signed his new deal with the newly relaunched Monument Records, everything started to change.
“When this project got some heat,” he tells ABC Radio, “people kinda came out of the woodwork and were like, ‘Hey, you wanna grab some coffee or you want to write or you want to hang out?’ I would feel guilty for not wanting to. I was like, ‘But y’all broke up with me, so I’m really the nice one.’ That’s where ‘You Broke Up with Me’ came from.”
Walker’s debut album, boom., comes out on Friday, and he confesses he gets more than a little satisfaction from its title.
“It’s kind of a mic drop, you know, like ‘See, that just happened!’” he says. “That’s kind of something we — my team and I — text each other a lot. Anytime something great happens, we’re like, ‘Hey, look, the song’s #17. Boom!’ We had to name it boom.”
The 10-track debut disc drops on Friday, and of course, it features the gold-certified lead single.
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