In 2005, Walker Hayes moved to Nashville with his wife Laney to pursue his country music dreams. Since then, the couple has added six children to their family. Sadly, tragedy struck for the “Fancy Like” hitmaker and his family in June 2018, when their seventh child, daughter Oakleigh, died the same day she was born. At that time, Hayes had two and a half years of sobriety under his belt. During a recent interview, the Grammy nominee, 45, opened up about just how close he came to losing it all that day.
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Walker Hayes Was Bent On Destruction the Day of His Daughter’s Burial
Recently, Walker Hayes visited the K-Love Morning Show for an interview that aired Aug. 6. Speaking with hosts Carlos and Amy, he recounted one of the most painful days of his life.
Immediately upon arriving home from burying baby Oakleigh at the cemetery, Hayes jumped in his car and headed for downtown Franklin “just to self-destruct.”
“I mean, I couldn’t mentally or physically tolerate, you know, whatever that feeling was,” said the “Pants” singer, 45. “It was indescribable. And I had never felt anything like it, you know?”
Drowning in emotions he couldn’t understand, Hayes ended up at a bar called 55 South on Main Street. Peering through the window, he caught a glimpse of three men sitting inside at the bar — and made up his mind.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to get a little buzz and I’m going to just mess with those guys. I’m just going to get in a fight with those guys,’” he recalled.
“It makes zero sense,” he acknowledged, “but I just want a clean slate. I just want to start over, you know, and just explode.”
[RELATED: Walker Hayes Looking for New Record Label After Monument Records Closes]
Fate Intervened
However, Walker Hayes soon recognized that his wallet wasn’t in the door of his Honda. So he got back into the driver’s seat and headed home to retrieve it. There, he found his wife Laney sitting alone in the dark, silently grieving her baby daughter.
“I could literally see what I was about to do… She was going to have to pick me up from jail the next day, and we were going to have to start the rehab process all over and go back to square one.”
Instead of grabbing his wallet and heading downtown for a night of drunken regret, Hayes went inside his house and had a “wonderful conversation” with his wife, who found an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for him to attend.
Featured image by John Medina/Getty Images
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