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Radio Feedback: Hunter Hayes

hunter hayes

I’ve been lucky to have interviewed Hunter Hayes several times last year. A fan of his music, I’ve been known to have his songs on repeat for hours (especially “Wanted” and “I Want Crazy”). So, when I sat down to interview him, I had to ask about the first time he heard his song on the radio and if he ever gets tired of it (he doesn’t.) For a guy who has been performing live since he was four-years-old, who could blame him?

“I had just come off a six-week radio tour so it was a bit of a time warp for me,” he told me. “I had never been on the road that long. I was leaving dinner with my publisher and we were parked on opposite ends of the parking lot and she pulled around to where I was parked and rolled down the window and there was ‘Storm Warning,’ rocking. So I turned my car off and went over to her car and we jammed a little bit. That was the first time I heard it on the radio out of the blue.”

He added: “That’s not something you get used to or get comfortable with necessarily. It still catches me off guard a little bit and I think it always will because there’s something magical about somebody else endorsing your music that way, believing in you like that. It was really cool.”

 

 

To read my complete interview, visit Radio.com.

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Radio Feedback: T-Pain

Press Photo 3_7
(Credit: Hannibal Matthews)

Last year, I began asking every artist that I interviewed about the first time they heard themselves on the radio. I’m not quite sure where exactly I came up with the question, but it was always one of those moments in an interview that each artist would light up as they told me about it. I mentioned it one day in a meeting and everyone seemed to like the idea. Somehow, it became a big initiative right before the GRAMMYs and ACM Awards and many of the artists I asked this wound up in a commercial for Radio.com. On TV!

Later in the year, we decided to make it a weekly feature so every Monday I assign and help select some of the best answers to that question. This week’s feature is T-Pain, the very first rapper I’ve ever interviewed. His answer was a rather unique one.

“The first song of mine that I heard on the radio was ‘Time To Make Love,'” he told me. “I don’t even think it was on my first album. It was part of a mixtape I did before it came out. I was in my dad’s house in my room asleep. I definitely heard it in my sleep and I woke up and was like, ‘Oh man, I totally missed it!’ I definitely heard it but I was dreaming. I was laying down in my dream, but when I woke up I was like, ‘Oh that was really on the radio just then!’ I wish I had woken up a little earlier.”

He went on to tell me about his next album, Stoicville: Rise of the Phoenix, due out later this year.

“It’s a crazy range of songs, from swing songs and songs from the 60s to reggae songs and R&B,” he said. “I’m putting a country song on my album. There’s a lot of range so it’s hard to say what we want the sound to be. Anything that we pick will be a lot of range.”

For my complete interview, visit Radio.com. Stay tuned for more of my chat with T-Pain!