Atlantic Records

It's easy to envy Hunter Hayes. At the age of four, the singer-songwriter had already shared the stage with Hank Williams, Jr. By six, he'd appeared in his first feature film, 'The Apostle,' alongside Oscar winner Robert Duvall, who happened to give Hunter his first guitar. And before he was a teenager, the Louisiana native played with June Carter and Johnny Cash, as well as Charlie Daniels. Oh, and then there's the time he performed for President Clinton.

Things haven't slowed down for the musical prodigy in the past 15 years. The now 19-year-old is in the middle of a 10-city run on the North American leg of Taylor Swift's Speak Now World Tour. His debut single 'Storm Warning,' which he co-wrote, is making its way up the charts, and he recently completed recording his debut album, on which he played every instrument.

"When I started writing music, I wanted to do my own thing, but I didn't really know anything about the demo process," Hunter tells The Boot. "I'd been in a studio, but not for my own stuff. What ended up happening is that I had a band trailer in the backyard full of instruments, because I played with a band every now and then, on the weekends at festivals and things. I tried to learn one instrument at a time and eventually -- remember, I was in seventh grade -- for Christmas I got my first recorder and I started making my own recordings of the music.

"It was the only way I knew it would get out," Hunter continues. "I didn't have the resources to do it any other way and I wanted people to hear it. I didn't know if they ever would. It's the only way I've ever done it ever since. It's a habit now. It allows me to take a little more control over it and reinterpret the songs, tweak it, fix it. We had this great idea of, let's go into the studio and try it. We did. I was nervous, because working with [producer] Dann Huff, he's one of my heroes. I've done the process but not quite to that extent and going into the studio with him, he made it easy. We took our time and had fun with it. I had a bunch of fun with 30 instruments in the studio. There's 20 different versions of acoustic [guitars], four different mandolins, different tunings."

The multi-instrumental approach is something he plans to leave in the studio for now. "When I go to see a show, I'm going for the song and to see somebody do their thing," he says. "That's my time to lay back, relax, get on an acoustic or electric guitar and sing the songs. Live, it's about playing the songs, not having to play every instrument."

Hunter wrote or co-wrote every track on his debut CD, which, coupled with playing every instrument, leads him to admit his biggest flaw. "There's this little control freak thing in me when it comes to my music," he notes. "I'm only kidding. I feel like writing everything helps me. I could search for songs and find ones that I relate to and be real about them, sing them like I mean them. But I also feel like writing it makes it so that there are no more walls. It's me talking to the person listening and saying something I couldn't say otherwise through the music."

Whether writing solo or with co-writers, the process is an emotional one for the young musician. "The ones I write myself, I end up arguing with myself as opposed to when I write with someone else," he says with a laugh. "Writing by myself, I spread that out more. I'll spend more time on a song then. I'm more critical about it, because there's no one else in the room to tell me, 'That's really not translating. I'm not getting what you're saying.' So, I'm constantly rewriting it, thinking, 'No, that's fine,' and going back. Writing with someone else, they pull more out of me. Sometimes we end up getting even more of a real song. They sometimes have another way of saying it that I've never been able to figure out."

That last part was certainly true when Hunter and his co-writers sat down to pen 'Storm Warning.'

"I got to write with a couple of guys, one of which I'd never written with before, by the name of Mike Busbee. I was also writing with Gordie Sampson, who was one of the co-writers I write with, and he's from Canada. He comes in with this idea called 'Storm Warning.' A lot of times we come up with ideas we can write around and try to figure out what we can relate to. On this day, I don't know why, I took 'Storm Warning,' and went from weather to love in a heartbeat. As a 19-year-old, I figured out that it made me feel like the girl I was interested in at the time was not bad news, but not necessarily good for me. I wanted to spend time with her, I wanted to get to know her, but at the back of my mind I knew that it was probably going to end soon and it wasn't going to end well. There were red flags all over, but I just ignored them. That's what I related to, for whatever reason, and we ended up writing that exact thing."

Just as Hunter finishes his sentence, our interview is interrupted. On one of the television screens near us, an encore of the CMT Music Awards is being aired, with the bumper (the portion between the show and a commercial break) featuring Hunter's performance of 'Storm Warning.'

"I haven't heard it yet. I've watched it but I haven't heard it. This is the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me. Wow," he says, looking to our recorder and adding, "That pause is because I just saw me on TV."

"That was amazing," he says of his first-ever performance on an awards show. "I sat in that audience last year, not in the nose-bleeds, but I was up in the bleachers, and I thought, 'Hopefully, someday.' Exactly a year later, I got to do a bumper on that show. I got to do a red carpet for the first time. I had no idea what that was like, but it was really cool. Walking into the venue for rehearsal, there were people standing outside and one person yelled, 'Hunter!' It was unbelievable for me. I was like, 'Do they mean me? Or is there some other Hunter they're looking for?' It's not something I'm used to and it's amazing."

Even though he's an old pro, the child prodigy confesses to still experiencing butterflies. "I get anxious for shows," he says. "A five-song show, there is so much I want to get in. There's so much running through my mind that I want to do. Eventually, I have to step on stage and enjoy it. Auto-pilot takes over. I'm doing what I've always done. Every now and then, it's a little nerve-wracking. I'm hoping I get used to it."

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