While they might aspire to filets and champagne, the budget allows for Bourbon steaks and shakes. Not every lyric works (there’s a line about his partner dipping Hayes like French fries in a Wendy’s Frosty that doesn’t compute), but Hayes’ assessment that working- and middle-class suburban families like his gravitate toward affordable comfort is spot on. Naturally, Applebee’s embraced the song and used it in a TV ad, making “Fancy Like” all but inescapable.īut aside from the instantly memorable hook, the song’s appeal lies in the knowing way that it looks at class. “We fancy like Applebee’s on a date night/Got that Bourbon Street steak with the Oreo shake/Get some whipped cream on the top too/Two straws, one check, girl, I got you,” he sings, in a “Hokey Pokey”-like cadence. Casual listeners know “Fancy Like” as the “Applebee’s song,” thanks to a nursery-rhyme chorus that prominently name-drops the casual dining establishment. “Like, ‘Hey, I drive the same Altima,’ or ‘Hey, I love how y’all live in a normal house.’ My thought process is like, ‘Where did you think we lived? I’m not Luke Bryan or anything.’”Īfter more than a decade of working in and around country music, Hayes finally has a breakthrough hit - at 41 years old. “I’ve noticed people noticing their lives in mine,” Hayes tells Rolling Stone. Hayes and his collaborators had been recounting heavy stories about gratitude and grief - the Alabama native and his wife Laney had lost their seventh child at birth in 2018 - but he was also intrigued by the way fans were reacting on social media to his ordinary, unostentatious home life. It was this idea of “fancy” that came to mind when Hayes sat down with Josh Jenkins, Cam Bartolini, and Shane Stevens earlier this year for one of their first in-person writing sessions since the pandemic began. “With a large family, that is quite fancy. “If we’re on a road trip, I address the whole car: ‘Do you guys want Sonic, you want McDonald’s, or do you want to sit down? Hey, we could be fancy and go to Applebee’s,’” he says. ![]() ![]() When Walker Hayes and his family of six are out and about, he’ll often put their dinner destination to a vote.
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