If he succeeds, Hayes will break a record set two years ago by the Flaming Lips, for whom Hayes opened during an early-morning stop in Hattiesburg, Miss. By the time the Lips established their record later that day, Hayes already was figuring out to make their title short-lived.
“I may have plotted it out on my phone on the way back from the Flaming Lips thing,” says Hayes, sitting in his publicist’s office at Warner Bros. “I may have gotten on my map and started doing some research, going from town to town, thinking we could fly to one. We could do helicopters.”
ALBUM OF THE WEEK: ** 1/2 for ‘Storyline’
That’s the level of ambition driving the 22-year-old singer and multi-instrumentalist, whose previous album, 2011’s Hunter Hayes, yielded three million-selling singles, including the crossover hit Wanted. Hayes ups the ante on Storyline (out Tuesday). “It just goes all over the place — which, quite frankly, is pretty well representative of me,” he says. “(I’m) just constantly distracted and taking in influences from all kinds of different stuff.”
Hayes speaks in short, rapid-fire bursts, new ideas forming in his head before he finishes expressing his previous one. He makes records the same way. While Storyline is a more fully realized work than its predecessor, it also suggests massive, still-untapped potential.
“Hunter Hayes is nowhere near a finished project,” says Gregg Swedberg, program director for Minneapolis country station KEEY-FM. “Look at some of the other artists who are really awesome musicians, like Keith Urban. They were so much older than Hunter was when they hit. They had a lot of time to grow up and get seasoned. Hunter has gotten really good, really fast and is still in the process of growing.”
If Hayes’ Storyline has an inciting incident, that point where the entire plot shifts, it’s when he began buying LPs. “I started collecting vinyl, in the middle of the record,” he says. After that, “I really wanted the record to sound like parts of it could have been made years ago.”
He wound up tracking most of the album in Nashville at the old RCA Studio A, now owned by Ben Folds. “Half the records I have that were made in Nashville were made at that studio,” he says, including ones by Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, Chet Atkins and George Strait.
Hayes also established parameters for the recording of Storyline, sometimes simply for his own amusement. For instance, because he had recently purchased a pair of vintage instruments, a 1928 Dobro resonator guitar and a 1915 mandolin, he decided to include them on every track.
“The mandolin and the resonator are literally hidden on two tracks, just because I wanted them on the songs,” he says. “You can’t even hear it in the mix, but they’re there.”
Fans got their first taste of Hayes’ new music when he unveiled single Invisible during January’s Grammy Awards telecast. A ballad that addresses youthful alienation and bullying, “Invisible certainly speaks to a segment of the audience, because we’ve had some very emotional responses to the song, and it’s certainly selling digitally,” says Mike Moore, program director at KWJJ-FM in Portland, Ore. “But I don’t know that it’s going to be a giant radio hit for him. The early research on it is just so-so.”
Even so, Invisible, No. 20 on USA TODAY’s country airplay chart, is important on a personal level for Hayes, who identifies with the song’s emotions.
“I know however rough I had it (growing up), there are so many people who had it so much worse,” he says. “What I can specifically remember are the nights of not having any plans, months of being by myself.”
That loneliness, though, came with a silver lining: “It drove me back to my little studio to write about it. Just to make music where I felt I could really be something. Where I felt like I was cool. It gave me a reason to discover that thing I wanted to do.”
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