615:  I'm really loving the new song, ‘The Way She Lies,’ - the first time I heard it, the hook just got me. I loved it. Can you speak a little bit more about how you came to end up recording this one and putting it out as your next single?

SH: Yeah, absolutely. just like you, the first time that I heard it - it was pitched to me by one of my good friends down here, and someone that I do a lot of writing with, Tim Owens - he was one of the writers on the song, and he said, “I want to send you a song. Just let me know what you think.” I heard it. And I just was like, “I have got to record that.” That is a real country song, right there. It’s got the steel. It's lonesome. It's a heartbreak song. I mean, it's like everything that country music was built on. And I told him I listened to it once, and I said, “Man, I absolutely love it. I 100% want to record it. What do I have to do?” And we got straight to the studio as soon as we could, and we cut it. And I'm just so happy about it. I'm so excited for the song. I can't wait for the world to hear it. And I think it's just one of those songs that you hear it and it sticks with you, and you can sing along to it. A lot of people can relate to it. So I'm very blessed to have been able to be the one to record it.

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615: No absolutely like you say, it's one of those songs, you can hear it once or twice, and the chorus, particularly, just sort of sticks with you, and it is, it's a traditional country song. I mean, that's one of the things I really like about your music. It's really cool to hear more traditional sounding country coming back to the mainstream. I feel like mainstream country has lost that element a little bit. Who are some of the artists that have influenced you?

SH: Well, I think that my influences kind of speak for my music as well. You know, I grew up on the traditional country; the older group of guys: I listened to George Jones, Keith Whitley, Hank Jr, Hank senior, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Elvis, all those guys, the people that built country music into what it is today. They're my heroes. And if I can, you know, go on to carry on that style of music, you know, with the pedal steel and the fiddle. That's something that I'm really starting to try to bring back with my music. We've got pedal steel and fiddle again, which hasn’t been in country music for a little bit. It's not so mainstream anymore, but that's the style of country music that I love and grew up on, and so that's where a lot of the influence comes from.

 

615: Absolutely, and like you say, that is the sound that built country music, that made it what it is. And now it's like, that traditional sound, there's not enough of it right now, and it is really cool that you are bringing it back. I grew up listening to country in my granddad's car, listening to Keith Whitley, Dolly, Loretta Lynn and all those other guys as well. That's how I first got into country music, so it really brings back that sense of nostalgia for me as well.

 SH: I think we have a very similar story growing up. You know, we listen to a lot of our parents and grandparents music, and that's what sticks with you, and just like you, that's how it was for me. So I'm excited that we can go down this path and hopefully really put out some really strong sounding country music.

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Photo: SpencerHatcher.com​

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615: It sounds like you had a quite a musical family, like your first band, you fronted a bluegrass band. Is that right? With your brother and your dad on guitar?

 SH: Yes, ma'am. Let's see; Connor, my younger brother, picked up the bass when he was 12, and I'd already been in bluegrass for a couple of years, but once he picked up the bass, we had enough instruments for a family band. So me, my dad, and Connor, started playing anywhere that we could: churches, lawn parties, fairs and retirement homes and just all sorts of places like that. I was 15 years old at the time. I'd already played maybe two or three shows by the age of 14, I would say. But as a family band, it started then, and that was where the, I guess the hunger for performing and music grew. Then I went on to being in bluegrass bands at East Tennessee State University, and I was in a professional bluegrass band based out of Asheville, North Carolina. And it wasn't until after college that I started moving into country music. But even still today in my shows, I still do a bluegrass segment where I'll do five, six bluegrass songs, because it just means a lot to me. So bluegrass has been a huge part of my music growing up.

 

615: And both genres are rooted in storytelling, right? It might sound a little bit different, but it's all based around telling good stories. What made you pivot to focusing more on country music?

SH: I've always loved country music, but like I said, I was always in bluegrass, and I think I just played so much bluegrass music by the time that I was 19 years old, country just really started to appeal to me. And it wasn't until one day where it was like a switch just flipped in me; I watched Walk the Line,  the Johnny Cash movie, and I'd already seen it a couple times, but this one time in particular I was watching it, I was like, Man, I just want to be able to play like Luther Perkins. I just didn't know how to play the guitar; I was 19 years old when I decided to pick the guitar up, and I taught myself how to play like Luther and how to strum the guitar and shape the chords. And it was actually the week that me and my family were at the beach, and so instead of me going out on the beach, and, you know, enjoying the vacation, I stayed in for hours every single day, just teaching myself guitar. And I learned three of those Johnny Cash songs that I'd heard in the movie in a day. And just it was at that moment I knew I was like, 'Man, I want to start doing Johnny Cash at the Bluegrass shows.'

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615: Does your brother still play with you?

SH: Oh, yeah. Connor is a phenomenal bass player, upright bass fiddle, like you see in bluegrass. He slaps it. He picked up the electric bass once I moved into country music so that he could come on the road with me and start playing shows and provide some backup harmonies. He’s stuck by my side this entire time.

615: It adds another unique element to your music too, having that family element, those harmonies.

SH: Absolutely! He's played every single show with me since we started, and we've done over 500 shows in the last four years, so he has been by my side the entire time.

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615: You mentioned Johnny Cash, I have to ask - just going back to July 2020 for a little bit - you uploaded a cover of Folsom Prison Blues to TikTok and gained 10,000 followers overnight. How did it feel to have such a viral response to your guys music?

 SH: That was probably one of the most exciting days of my life. I didn't have many followers, and that was my fifth video I'd ever posted. My very first one ever went up on April 2, and by July 13th, that Johnny Cash video went viral, and it was just absolutely insane. I remember hearing my phone go off and not knowing what it was, and I'd had, like, I'd been away from my phone for about 30 minutes, and when I checked it, I had like, 8000 notifications, and I couldn't believe it. Facebook was going viral at the same time that Tiktok was going viral. And so on two platforms, I was going viral at the same time, and it was like comments were rolling in faster than I could respond. The likes were shooting up. The followers were just increasing at a rapid pace. It was like, literally, every time I would refresh the screen, which would be maybe a second or two, there would be another 100 followers. Every second to two seconds, there would be a new 100 followers. It was taking off that quick, and I went to sleep with about 24 followers the night before and the next morning, I had over 10,000! It changed my life forever, just because of that one video I was given a shot in country music.

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Video: Spencer Hatcher TikTok​

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​​615: It's such a cool story. And like you said, you've now played over 500 shows. What's your favourite thing about getting out there and getting to play a live show?

SH: I'm the happiest when I'm on stage. 100%! I love being on stage. I'm comfortable being on stage. The thing that that I really love is it brings so many people together. You know, I've gotten to see this crazy formation of what I guess artists would call a fan base over the last four years in live performances. But to me, it's become like the biggest group of friends and family. I don't even know how normal it is, but the way that I do shows is, you know, I treat everybody like they're a friend. I go out and I shake every hand that I can. I talk to every single person that I can. And, I mean, we racked up hundreds of friends over these last four years to where, last year, we practically broke and set a new record at every venue that we played on attendance and, you know, revenue generated for these businesses, if it was a restaurant or even fairs, we were breaking records at fairs on attendances in the local community in Virginia. But it's just been so amazing to go out and play these shows and see people come together. It’s the greatest thing in the world to me, to be on stage and to see people smiling and singing along and loving the music that you're performing. To me, there's not a greater job in the entire world.

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615: I read that a few months ago you had a pretty rough accident, but you were still back up on the stage within like, three weeks of doing some really serious damage after a fall. Is that correct?

SH: It is. That was September 23rd of 2024. I fell about 20 feet off a roof and I landed on my rock path. I fractured my pelvis in three areas, I chipped two bones off of it, broke three ribs and had a pulmonary contusion. But that was a total blessing, because the trauma care nurses told me that the actual chances of me surviving that fall is typically less than 5%. But the miracle behind it all is that my head never hit the ground, and I landed on my back. It can't be explained, but, God was there looking over me, and he blessed me. I was unable to perform for a few weeks, but it was the third week after the accident, and I said, well, either I can sit at home or I can sit up on stage, and so I'd rather be on stage, so that's what I did. It was three weeks after that, that I started playing shows again, and I wound up playing the last probably 20 or 25 shows of the year, and now I'm gearing up to move down to Nashville. So it's been a crazy last six months to say the least.

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615: No doubt, that's a whole lot of things to happen to someone in a lifetime, let alone, six months. How has that changed your perspective now?

SH: I think it's not only changed my perspective, but it's probably changed my life 100%. The way that I look at things now, even outside of music, every single day, I know that I probably should not have been able to see today. I shouldn't have been able to see yesterday, but I got to and so I see everything as a huge blessing. My mentality kind of changed afterwards. I've always had maybe an extreme work ethic, I actually feel uncomfortable if I'm not being productive. And I think it was getting to a very excessive point right before I fell. But as I've come back, I've had a different mindset, still working really hard every single day, but I can look at it in a different way now; being able to perform, even maybe the way that you talk to somebody, you just think about when you go through something like I did, speaking to people, you never really know what they're going through. You know kindness can be shared in lots of different ways, and so it's just a lot of different things has changed for me, but my perspective, especially, I think has just changed for the better altogether.

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615: I think it's super inspiring. And now you signed with Stone Country Records in October. How have you found the transition going from being an independent artist to now being signed to a label?

SH: It's been really interesting for me. I absolutely love the Stone Country Record team. They're phenomenal people. It's a family here at this record label. And I would take this every single time over any other option, you know, because so so rarely do I think that you find in big business, people still carry family oriented mentality through a business day, you know. And to be part of this label, you can feel like you are part of something. They include me. And I really, really love that. One of the things I'm still adjusting to is, for four years, I practically built everything that I've done on my own. You know, I did all of the marketing, I did all of the social media, all of the performances, the practice, the setup, everything behind the scenes. Now I'm adjusting to consulting with a team. There's more heads being put together to come up with ideas; it's a very beneficial thing to have more than just one set of eyes looking at everything. I'm able to give up some of my attention to certain areas and devote more time to other areas, like music and songwriting. I didn't always have time for songwriting when I was tackling one of the other seven branches of business that I had to do before I had this team. And now I'm able to do a lot more with my time than what I was before. So it has been an adjustment, because I like to be on top of everything and in total control. But here I'm still able to do that. You know, I'm informed with everything. I get to see everything come together and everybody working hard for a common goal. It's been amazing.

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