Walker Hayes Posts His Witty Remarks About His Squabble With Zach Bryan

Walker Hayes responded with a snippet of an unreleased ballad after his social media squabble with fellow artist Zach Bryan over Hayes’ smash-hit single, “Fancy Like.”

Earlier this month, Bryan wrote in a repost on X, formerly Twitter, that it was “f****n insane” that Tyler Childers just scored his first charting single with “In Your Love,” after a years-long career as a singer-songwriter. Bryan followed up in another repost, seemingly taking a stab at Hayes’ hit, “Imagine being radio (whoever the hell that is), hearing Shake the Frost [Childers’ song] and being like, ‘no no let’s go with the Applebees song.’”

That post garnered nearly 200 replies, and Bryan clarified he’s “not insulting anyone! Meant it with humor not malice, different strokes different folks was just bent about the first ever on mainstream radio thing my bad.”

Hayes responded at that time to Bryan’s post about “the Applebees song,” writing: “Big shout to radio for playing dat Applebees song. Zach and Tyler praying y’alls continued success.”

Now, Hayes has a different response.

The “Fancy Like” hitmaker said he was talking about “the whole Zach Bryan” thing with some of his buddies. He admitted that he put his best foot forward, but had “a hundred smart a** responses in the chamber that I didn’t fire off.” He wrote in his caption on Instagram when he posted part of the song on Wednesday night (January 24):

“Me and my buddies were talking about the whole Zach Bryan thing. They were saying they appreciated how I responded. I confessed that they only saw my best foot forward. I had a hundred smart a** responses in the chamber that I didn’t fire off. Then we got to talking about people in general. Why we get insecure, etc. Mostly about how artists size each other up, compare, and talk trash. It’s obviously our natural human tendency to be a little butt hurt by anyone else’s success. Then we wondered about that. Why on earth we would do that as song writers. Knowing that .0001 percent of us are actually making it in this biz. Took me 18 years to feed my kids with music and I’ll still knock something I hear on the radio cuz I didn’t write it. So, we tried our best to put it all in a Twanger. And this is what we got. I hope it makes y’all talk about stuff that matters.”

Hayes name-drops Bryan’s “Something In The Orange,” feeling like “throwing punches” (though “Jesus didn’t die for me so I could fight with Zach Bryan”), insisting there’s no hard feelings because he’s also “talked sh*t” about radio hits and more. Listen to it here: