Walker Hayes has officially responded to Zach Bryan calling him out on X (formerly known as Twitter), and he made it fittingly “Fancy.”
So fancy, that he wrote a song about the situation. “Woke up this morning, read something mean / Something in the orange says you’re feeling green,” he sings on the track posted to Instagram on Wednesday (Jan. 24), in reference to Bryan’s “Something In the Orange” hit. “Felt like throwing punches / I just held ‘em back / Because Jesus didn’t die for me so I could fight with Zach.”
In the post’s caption, Hayes noted that while his friends commended him for taking the kind road in his response, he had “a hundred smart a— responses in the chamber that I didn’t fire off.”
He continued, “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’ post comes in response to a tweet earlier this month that Bryan posted comparing Hayes to Tyler Childers, who just notched his first top 50 country radio hit with “In Your Love,” despite being in the music business for a decade and becoming one of country’s most beloved artists.
“Imagine being radio (whoever the hell that is), hearing [Childers’] ‘Shake the Frost’ and being like, ‘no no let’s go with the Applebees song,’” Bryan wrote, referencing a line in Hayes’ TikTok-dance-fueled hit “Fancy Like,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2021 and stayed atop the Hot Country Songs chart for 24 weeks.
See Hayes’ response below.
