Surely there should be a colon between ‘Country Stuff’ and ‘The Album’. It turns out correct grammar is too much for Walker Hayes’ management. It sets the tone for the album to come remarkably well, though.
To clarify, the only reason I’m reviewing Walker Hayes is because he’s an easy target to write a negative review on to help me gain some credibility as a critic. Even with that in mind, I was not ready for what I was getting myself into: an absolute hellscape. I get that Walker Hayes has been an easy punching bag for country fans for years, but I was not expecting an album that fails on almost every conceivable level. Production, songwriting, vocals, this is a failure across the board, only saved from being bottom-of-the-barrel by the occasional moment of competence that I can only assume was stumbled upon by accident.
The easiest place to start is with Walker Hayes himself. Most of the time he is not a convincing presence behind the mic. He references that he’s not a great singer on ‘What You Don’t Wish For’, but it goes beyond him simply not being able to sing well. His smug Sam Hunt-esque talk/rapping is so limp and frail that it’s a wonder nobody asked for another take on a majority of songs here. Luckily, the producers have a solution to this problem: completely swamp out the vocals when the hooks roll around. The horrendously misplaced chanting backing vocals on ‘Life With You’, the cheap overweight synth on ‘Delorean’, the shaker on ‘Briefcase’ which I swear is louder than the main vocal, the production goes so far out of its way to compromise what limited presence Walker Hayes has to amusing, but ear-bleeding results.
The production as a whole as a complete joke. The guitars hardly sound like guitars most of the time (‘Fancy Like’ being the biggest culprit in that regard), the drums are thin and obviously programmed, and the album has this icky synthetic drizzle smothered all over it that turns everything into unlistenable, overmixed mush. The slobbering whooshing effects on ‘Craig’ (which is basically just a pop song) make it particularly insufferable. I thought this production style died along with bro-country in 2015, but apparently, I was wrong
Songs like the godawful opener ‘Drinking Songs’, ‘AA’, ‘U Gurl’ and the title track sound like tracks even Florida Georgia Line would have had the good sense to reject in 2014, and at least Florida Georgia Line would sound like they were having a shred of fun on their dumb party songs. Walker Hayes’ vocals meanwhile are so sterile and flat that it’s hard to decipher any emotion from them whatsoever. The title track even features Jake Owen, a singer who has way more expressive presence and charisma than the walking billboard that is Walker Hayes and could have done alright on this production, but he doesn’t even get the dignity of a full verse. What a waste. On the topic of waste, Lori McKenna’s songwriting is utterly squandered on ‘Briefcase’ by the guitars that sound too watery to carry any kind of tune. It might be the best song here, but you can tell Lori McKenna is coasting.
The waste is even worse in the case of ‘What If We Did’, a song about fantasising about a relationship that ends up one of the most self-indulgent songs here. The track features Carly Pearce, one of the big breakout stars in mainstream country as of late, but on a song that could have desperately done with some balance she is given approximately fuck all to do. Imagine being stuck singing backup to Walker Hayes. Just imagine. Imagine sitting down and taking some time to consider how the fuck your career trajectory has gotten you to the point where you’re singing backup to FUCKING WALKER HAYES.
That’s the problem with bro-country. All feminine voices have to be suppressed. Everything a woman says must be treated with casual disinterest because the sub-genre is so inherently masculine there’s simply no space for it. It’s done seemingly irreversible damage to the industry, and also does irreversible damage to this album. ‘What If We Did’ is the most obvious example. Walker Hayes is so wrapped up in his own fantasy of how he wants this potential relationship to go that he refuses to take a step back and acknowledge what the girl in question might want (not to mention Carly Pearce sounds actively embarrassed to be singing lines “it would be rad if it did”). Songs like ‘U Gurl’ are so insufferably self-satisfied in how they objectify women that it makes me want to slam my face into a brick wall until my nose starts bleeding. The attitude is just fucking obnoxious. And on the topic of obnoxious attitudes, I guess we should talk about the songwriting, easily the worst thing about Country Stuff The Album.
Walker Hayes appears to be operating in two very different worlds. On the one hand you have songs like ‘AA’, ‘What You Don’t Wish For’ and ‘Briefcase’ that attempt to frame him as the down to earth country singer who’s just trying to get by and put food on the table for his kids (the title track even has an outro describing how he’s “just tryna feed the kids” and how we should see that as an excuse for his lazy songwriting). The issue is that the clunky overproduction doesn’t reflect that persona in the slightest and the album is a tonally dissonant disaster as a result. How am I supposed to take those songs seriously when they’re on the same album as ‘Fancy Like’, a song that has enough corporate product placement to make your average mainstream rapper go ‘uhh, that’s a bit much’. He’s clearly just another cog in the mainstream country machine, and no amount of clumsy songwriting or Lori McKenna co-writes is likely to convince anyone of the contrary. I didn’t think it was possible for a lightweight bro-country album to be as much of a conceptual failure as this one is, but here we are.
However much I would love to slaughter songs like ‘Drinking Songs’ (which includes the line “Ash tray full of all my ciga-regrets”), ‘U Gurl’ and ‘Country Stuff’ for being painfully generic bro-country schlock that would have felt dated half a decade ago, the truth is that (despite the headache inducing over production) those songs are among the more tolerable tracks on the album from a songwriting perspective. For downright awfulness, look no further than ‘Hope You Miss Me’, a song where Walker Hayes wishes an ex farewell as she goes to chase her LA dream in the most disjointed and condescending way possible. Even though he acknowledges his own selfishness on the hook for wishing this ex misses him, it can’t sidestep the fact that Walker Hayes is 42 years old and has a wife and six children. The immature pettiness that he’s trying to sell in the song is the furthest thing from convincing as a result. Being a dick is one thing, but the songwriting and production is so sour that I get no sense that Walker Hayes is having any fun being the dick that he is.
Then there are the song that completely fail at romance. First the utterly embarrassing ‘Life With You’ which includes the line “Now I’m finna tell the world that my wife is you” (the forced attempt to crowbar in slang is enough to make me want to throw my headphones off the nearest bridge), and ‘Make You Cry’, a song about how Walker Hayes is such an amazing and emotional songwriter that he makes his wife cry happy tears every time he sings to her. I’ll believe that when I hear it you fucking hack.
The aforementioned obnoxious attitude that bleeds across this album ends up making moments that are trying to be more personal like ‘Craig’ and ‘Briefcase’ feel a lot worse than they actually are in context and end up crippling under the weight of the distastefulness around them. But the album’s absolute rock-bottom moment comes on ‘What You Don’t Wish For’, a simple song paying tribute to the young up-and-coming songwriters of the future, seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that none of those songwriters that Walker Hayes is looking to connect with will ever see him as an inspiration. He embodies that absolute opposite of what any self-respecting songwriter should be looking to achieve with their art. As I mentioned earlier, he’s just another cog in the cooperate machine. How is that aspirational?
The result of all of this is an album that thoroughly sickens me to my core. A museum worthy failure of atrocious songwriting, production that more closely resembles nails on a chalkboard than coherently produced music, and a performer who’s vaguely self-aware of his own ineptitude but lacks the basic competence to sell anything convincingly. This will be forgotten come year’s end, or at least I fucking hope it does.