ABC/Image Group LAWalker Hayes is currently enjoying his first top 10 hit, “You Broke Up With Me.” But as he told ABC Radio at the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville on Monday, it wasn’t that long ago, he was working at a not-very-glamorous day job, and dreaming that some big star would record one of his songs.
“My last full-time job outside of music was Costco, I was stocking produce,” the Alabama native tells ABC Radio. “I mean, it was rough, it was like 4 to 10:30 in the morning and then I would go and write [songs] for a publishing company.”
“[I] thought that was the best case scenario,” he continues. “Maybe a big artist throws me a bone, cuts one [of my songs], it’s a single and maybe I can afford to do music for a while. So yeah, the fact that I’m the artist now…it’s a miracle!”
Walker’s salvation was super-producer Shane McAnally, who signed the singer just two years ago.
“He made it so I could quit Costco, and then we began writing for this project,” explains Walker. “And that’s actually when we wrote ‘You Broke Up With Me.'”
As Walker explains, the song was inspired by his reaction to people coming out of the woodwork after they learned about his deal.
“As soon as the whole town found out that Shane McAnally was making a record [with] me, tons of people wanted to reconnect that had kinda vanished when I was working at Costco,” he says.
Walker is now taking a fatalistic approach to his success.
“If it all ended tomorrow, it’d be really sad,” he laughs. “But I can say we hit that top 10 mark. That’s pretty outstanding.”
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