Kansas State Fair: Hunter Hayes has an ‘invisible’ connection with fans

Wherever 22-year-old country singer Hunter Hayes goes, fans want to tell him stories.

They tell him how his song “Invisible” – a heartfelt message to teenagers feeling rejected by their peers – has affected their lives.

Hayes, who will perform at the Kansas State Fair on Saturday, will not talk about the stories he hears. He prefers to keep those moments between him and his fans.

His fans are a little more forthcoming, however.

“Hunter, I cannot thank you enough. You are the one that talked me out of suicide because of bullies. I love you,” wrote a fan on the music video’s YouTube page.

The comments section is filled with similar messages.

“There’s been times where I’ve thought about ending my own life. Sometimes I can’t see the good in life, but this song has helped to try and find the light,” said one commenter.

Hayes says he is always surprised by the response to “Invisible.”

“They’ve really rocked my world,” Hayes said. “That’s (the kind of impact) you want every song to have. You don’t expect it to happen. But man, when it does, it’s magical.

“It centers the soul. Maybe I’m doing something right.”

Hayes and his co-writers penned about 80 songs for his new album “Storyline” before eventually paring down the list to 14 tracks.

“Invisible” was the first song to make the cut.

“A lot of songs, I walk in with a title or concept. I bring it into my co-writers. Each of us have our own perspectives, so we try to tell each of our stories as best we can,” he said.

That’s not what happened with “Invisible,” however.

Hayes and co-writers Bonnie Baker and Katrina Elam started off working on a fun, upbeat love song. The song would not come together, however, no matter how hard they tried.

So Hayes, Baker and Elam started talking. They talked about growing up and feeling different.

Hayes said he was obsessed with music while growing up, something that his friends never understood.

“I never fit in. I am such a nerd. I’m proud of it, but it took me a long time to be proud of it.”

They started working on a chorus about feeling “invisible.”

But the song changed as they continued to write. Hayes said he wanted to convey it’s fine if you don’t fit in.

“It went from ‘you are not invisible’ to saying ‘all of this is going to be invisible,’” Hayes said.

When it came time to record the song, Hayes and producer Dann Huff originally decided to surround the song with a big sweeping arrangement to match its anthemic lyrics.

They spent four months getting it just right … until one day Hayes decided to trash it and start over.

“It was one of the most profound moments in my life,” he said. “It was big, it had this massive string arrangement. We mixed the song and one voice of reason comes through and says ‘I don’t think this is you.’”

The song sounded good, Hayes said, but it didn’t sound honest.

“After all this time, we had over-thought this song.”

But Hayes was running out of time.

His record label had planned to release “Invisible” as his album’s first single, which meant they needed the track a month earlier than the rest of “Storyline.”

“I had already reached my deadline,” he said. “We pushed it back to the last second.”

Hayes got his band back in the studio and, over the next four days, completely re-recorded the song.

They stripped the song down to drums, guitar, piano and bass. Hayes and Huff kept the string section but turned it way down in the mix.

When Hayes couldn’t get his vocals exactly right, they decided to go back to a demo recording he made soon after writing the song.

The demo was taped in the basement of an office building, but Hayes said that recording possessed an emotional honesty he could not recreate.

“What you hear is literally what it sounded like three hours after I wrote it.”

Hayes debuted the song in January at the 2014 Grammy Awards. The song peaked at No. 44 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and also was No. 14 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and No. 4 on the Hot Country Songs chart.

“It’s absolutely crazy. You are in this sort of vacuum with this studio stuff. You’re like ‘Oh, I hope somebody likes this,’” he said..

This story was originally published September 3, 2014 at 11:13 AM with the headline "Kansas State Fair: Hunter Hayes has an ‘invisible’ connection with fans."