Written by: Oliver Heffron
Catching up with Nuance before a show in Denver’s Marquis Theater, Christian Hayes finds himself in a new world on tour. “Seattle, Portland, Boise, Salt Lake City, Denver, and then Colorado Springs; I’ve never been to any of these cities before,” he says. “So yeah, man, it's cool in a lot of different ways.”
The tour’s also been his first chance to perform his new EP, 26, a heartfelt collection of tracks with a new, more indie-pop sound than his previous releases, leaning into a sound he describes as “Harry Styles meets The 1975,” and a return to home: “It’s the stuff that I love, the stuff that I grew up with.”
While fittingly written and recorded over the singer’s 26th year, 26 displays the perspective and skills of a songwriter much more experienced.
On tracks like the bittersweet “Caroline, Oh Caroline,” free-wheeling “65 on the Interstate,” and introspective title-track “26,” Hayes bears his soul as he finds himself at a crossroads, distilling the potent melancholy of looking back at your heartbreaks and lost dreams before you decide to take a path and never look back.
Born and raised in Rome, GA, Hayes describes his hometown as a “melting pot.” “You got your redneck side and your ghetto side, and everyone kinda coexists. It’s great,” he explains. “I spent a lot of time bouncing between the two. I was kind of always that guy who had friends in every group. So some days I was out playing pickup basketball, and some days I was out horseback riding. It really just depended on who I wanted to skip school with that day.”
Photo Credit: Sean Stout
One of Hayes’ early creative influences was his grandfather, Jack Hayes, a poet, sports journalist, food critic, and poet laureate for the state of Georgia: “He was always big on always writing down dreams and thoughts and poems and stories. His whole thing always was: ‘just write it down.’”
He explains that his dad provided the model for the music side of his dream: “He's the one I wanted to be cool like him, and pick up a guitar. So, then I just put two and two together.”
He remembers the moment he knew he wanted to be a musician: at his first concert, when he was 8 years old, watching the Christian rock band Third Day perform: “I remember seeing rock live, seeing the guys play, and I was like, ‘That looks fun. That’s what I want to do.’”
While he may have known he wanted to be a musician from a young age, life ended up getting in the way in the form of school, college, and a job in sales. But Hayes never let the music dream get too far away from him. “I just wrote and worked on my craft as much as I could,” he says. “I graduated college and I was in sales for several years, and social media is what kind of helped me get to where I am.”
Also a veteran of the U.S. Navy Reserve, Hayes brought military discipline to his work as a songwriter, amassing more than 900 original songs by his mid-twenties while building an online following. Hayes first realized his music dreams could become a reality when he shared a post of his song “Lily.” “I had like 400 followers on Instagram,” he explains. “I posted that on a Thursday night, and then I woke up that Saturday with like 10,000 followers, and life changed like that.”
On the inspiration for the tracks on 26, Hayes says it expresses his journey through a year of major life changes and shifts in perspective: “26 was the year that I got out of the Navy. It was, you know, it was the year that I signed a record deal, and I stopped working my sales job. There were so many life changes, it was a quarter life crisis.”
The title track, “26,” expresses how that age can be a confusing time as people enter different stages of life at the same time: “Half of my friends are married. I have friends who have been divorced. I have friends who have passed away. I have friends who have kids. Like, it's this whole navigating. None of us is really in the same season of life, but we're all still the same age.”
On “Flower Shop,” Hayes’s personal favorite off the EP, he expresses the important lessons he gleaned through a difficult breakup through the image of a flower struggling to grow. “I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” he reflects. “Part of being 26, and part of that breakup, was realizing how many things in my own life I needed to work on.”
On the free-spirited “65 on the Interstate,” Hayes turns the difficult breakup into an “outcry of hope.” “I was living in Nashville at the time, and she was living down in Atlanta,” he explains. “I was driving back and forth on Highway 75, and the speed limit on Highway 75 is 65 miles an hour. But the song itself is saying, ‘Hey, the whole world keeps turning.’”
With the EP and 26 in the rearview, Hayes is excited to get to next year, when he expects his debut album to arrive.