Walker Hayes has an ambitious goal for “Fancy Like Christmas.” “I have hope that the song eventually rivals ‘All I Want For Christmas,’” he tells American Songwriter of the Mariah Carey hit. His goal isn’t out of reach, as he found out the day he wrote “Christmas” that the original “Fancy Like” had been certified six times platinum. After “Fancy Like” went viral in 2021 from a TikTok video that showed him and his then-15-year-old daughter Lela doing the now-famous dance, it shot Hayes into superstardom. So when he was tasked by his record label to write the Christmas remix of “Fancy Like,” he jumped at the chance.
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He and co-writers Shane Stevens, Josh Jenkins, and Cameron Bartolini wrote most of the song via text chain and finished it up at the SMACK Songs office that was decorated for Christmas in their honor, transforming the office into a makeshift North Pole complete with the famous leg lamp from A Christmas Story.“There’s an effortless, almost like this was supposed to be,” Hayes says of the writing process. Using “Fancy Like” as a template, Hayes says that the opening lines Christmas is back, y’all / Bells in the track, y’all “break the fourth wall” for the listener. “This was a very difficult song to select what did and didn’t go,” he describes. “Each line is such important territory.”
[RELATED: Behind the Song: Walker Hayes’ Viral Hit “Fancy Like”]
As for his favorite lines in the song, he cites And all the Starbuckers in the line say / “Put some peppermint mocha in my latte” (“Star Buckers is a new phrase. I think a lot of people are loving that”) and Mall Santa scaring babies in his lap y’all (“I have six kids. I’ve definitely seen all of them cry in Santa’s lap, so that made me laugh”) as being the lines he’s most proud of. And the most memorable one is Go Jesus, it’s your birthday. “That line fell from the sky,” Hayes expresses. “I remember the moment we said it and, to us, that was the cornerstone. That makes the whole song worth it to me.”
Hayes had a career breakthrough when “Fancy Like” dropped in August 2021. It set off a trend on Tik Tok with people recreating the dance, while the song could be heard on TV screens everywhere in an Applebee’s commercial. It became his first No. 1 song on both the Billboard Country Airplay and Hot Country Songs chart and reached No. 3 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100.
“We might have more fun writing that than we did the original and I dare say, I think the Christmas version is better than the original version,” he professes. “I think the structure of ‘Fancy Like’ is a very lean song. There’s not a lot of extra going on. That’s what’s so beautiful about this song. How much cooler can a Christmas song be?”
Photo by Rick Diamond/Getty Images for Innovation In Music Awards
