A Quote by Walker Hayes

'Check Yes Or No' is a song that I reference in ''90s Country.' George Strait had a very crafty lyric: it tells a story then comes back around. Never gets old. — © Walker Hayes
'Check Yes Or No' is a song that I reference in ''90s Country.' George Strait had a very crafty lyric: it tells a story then comes back around. Never gets old.
I get asked all the time, "What is a George Strait song?" I know it when I hear it. I don't seek a specific tempo or lyric or melody. It just has to make sense. Maybe it is natural because I was given the gift to sing.
It don't matter if you put 'The Dance' out, or any old George Strait song. Someone is going to think that it's awful. You gotta be able to just sit back and kind of laugh it off and know you're doing exactly what you wanna do, and if people don't like it, then it's not really my place to tell them they have to like it.
It's very rare - and it does happen on occasion - where I'll take a piece of lyric and I'll just sit down and purposefully craft that melody around that lyric because I think the lyric is the wellspring for the song, without question.
I always wished I had a song like that George Strait song, 'The Chair', 'cause it's basically just a guy trying to pick up a girl at a bar.
I love that on country radio, you can hear a George Strait song, and the next is Sam Hunt. I love that there's such a variety.
My grandmother loved country music, and she's the one who really got me into country music. She had George Strait tapes, a bunch of them. I remember listening to tapes, taking them out, the covers and the back.
The song could start with a riff that I base the song around. Or a chord progression or a melody I have, I just write a story about it. Lyric-wise, it's cool to have someone else's input too.
The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
Everything stems from real experiences but I do also have a very vivid imagination. A song lyric gets easily carried away with itself and can end up somewhere I'd never have predicted.
I'm not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I'm still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it's very black-and-white.
My work is very dear to me, and certainly I have had all the emotional highs and lows that go with trying to get it to an audience. But I do have some kind of detachment that seems somewhat unusual in my trade. I'm a writer who writes every day. I don't have a period of months where I can't get anything done and I wander around tearing my hair out. When I come back from a book tour, for instance, I might have one day where I sleep late and then check my e-mail, and then go for a walk, and then the next day I'm really itching to get back at writing a story.
'Beneath the Piano' by The Devil Makes Three somehow reminds me of an old Johnny Cash song. The song is a lot of fun and tells a story.
I usually start with a lyric or a melody and then build a song around that.
I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.
If it was never new and it never gets old, then it's a folk song
Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time tells the story of a cosmologist whose speech is interrupted by a little old lady who informs him that the universe rests on the back of a turtle. Ah, yes, madame, the scientist replies, but what does the turtle rest on? The old lady shoots back: You can't trick me, young man. It's nothing but turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down.
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