ou’d spot them a mile off: two men who don’t exactly seem to be from ’round these parts. Outside a quiet café in Paddington Recreation Ground, west London, it looks like something from a Richard Curtis movie on this quiet Thursday morning. Little kids in yellow bibs are playing football in the park nearby; a man jogs past with a cocker spaniel over his shoulder as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
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These two men look quizzically on, the older one in a wide-brimmed hat, and the younger in shades with a silver necklace with the word “Jesus” around his neck. The lad with the necklace is Waylon Wyatt, the 18-year-old country star who seemed to emerge from pretty much nowhere when his raw, stripped-back songs of love, loss and his home state of Arkansas proved to be algorithmic dynamite on TikTok last year.
Waylon Wyatt on The Cover of NME. Credit: Rachel Billings for NME
Alongside him is dad Charley, who runs Charley’s General Construction, the company for whom Wyatt was working when his first song, the spit-and-sawdust ballad ‘Everything Under the Sun’, blew up on the app. This is not only their first time in London, but their second outside of America full stop. After dad genially leaves us to it, Wyatt reflects on what he’ll tell his pals back in Hackett, the town of around 800 residents in which he grew up and still lives, about the big city just across the pond.
“It feels like you’re on a whole new planet, honestly,” he tells NME with a shy smile. “And not in a bad way, either. You get here and you’re not like any other here. It’s different, and it feels like everyone here is their own main character – the different styles and, I guess, dialects you hear here, too. It’s very diverse here, as well. I didn’t figure it’d be that diverse, but it is.” How does that compare to where he’s from? “Hackett? It’s just a bunch of white country kids. That’s all it is.”
“It’s such a beautiful thing that people use my music to cope with their own emotions”
After capturing TikTok with ‘Everything Under The Sun’, he soon attracted the attention of Music Soup/Darkroom Records, the latter the Los Angeles-based label that’s also home to Billie Eilish and past Cover stars d4vd and Wisp. Simple, direct and emotionally intense, the song is a neat summation of everything that’s great about Waylon Wyatt. Here, he drew from country influences such as Tyler Childers, Hank Williams, Turnpike Troubadours, Wyatt Flores and fellow Arkansas legend Johnny Cash.
In fact, after hearing ‘Everything Under The Sun’, the biggest question you might have about Waylon Wyatt is how someone so young could – as Morrissey put it in the Smiths song ‘Sheila Take A Bow’ – “sing words so sad”.
Yet, Wyatt has already experienced heartache well beyond his years, as is evidenced by one of his greatest tracks. A decade ago, his older brother, Dylan, took his own life, an unimaginable loss crystallised in 2024’s ‘Phoning Heaven’. “I found your old contact in a phone book a while back,” Wyatt sings, “And I just wanna call it sometimes / And hope that you’ll be on the other line.” It’s a devastating song that will speak to anyone who’s ever lost someone.
Credit: Rachel Billings for NME
Although Wyatt describes it as one of his “least known songs”, it also understandably draws the most moving responses from fans: “I’ve had so many people, after shows, come up to me and tell me their stories about how that song’s helped them cope with their loss of loved ones as well. It’s sad that people relate to it, but it’s such a beautiful thing that people use it to cope with their own emotions. It’s a blessing that I put my pen to paper one time and it’s saved lives, in a way.”
Dylan was a guitar player himself: “He wasn’t Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix or Slash or anything too crazy, but he was really good.” Wyatt was around eight when Dylan died and so has only hazy memories of the brother who was 12 years his senior – what a grafter he was, the way he’d pass out on the couch in his boots after working with their dad. But he does remember the guitar, which inspired him to pick up the instrument in the first place.
“It was a way to kind of remember him by,” Wyatt explains, “and to always keep that memory close to me and remember him in a good manner. To be completely honest, I don’t remember exactly what he was all into and with each passing day, I forget a little more. Just playing the guitar… I mean, I do that on the daily, so it’s a way that I keep the memory of him. That’s where the beauty of it comes from: he’s an inspiration.”
Credit: Rachel Billings for NME
Waylon Wyatt finished high school this year and has no plans for further education; instead, he’s pursuing the music career that will, on the weekend of our encounter, see him appear at British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park to support country superstar Zach Bryan. It’s a mark of how far the crooner has come since his 2024 debut EP ‘Til The Sun Goes Down’, a stripped-down project recorded by himself in his parents’ kitchen – one that featured just brittle acoustic guitar and his paint-stripper vocal.
He recently released its gorgeous follow-up, the ‘Out Of The Blue’ EP, which, while still sparse in its production, sounds like ‘Thriller’ compared to its predecessor. This one envelops the arrangements with percussion and gentle slide guitar. Both, though, are contemporary takes on Red Dirt, the bluesy, minimalist country style that grew out of Oklahoma when it was popularised by the likes of Bob Childers in the 1980s.
“If there ain’t nobody hatin’ on you, you’re not really successful in the first place”
But Wyatt, and his 200million combined streams across the planet, isn’t the only country upstart that has stolen the hearts of music lovers and social media users. His peers are musicians such as Bayker Blankenship and Willow Avalon – fellow young southerners who hit paydirt on TikTok thanks to their own emotional country tunes that hit you like a shovel to the heart. Why does he reckon this is happening?
“Well, you know,” he says, “I feel that anyone can write a song and it just means something. Seeing all these youngsters in the music industry, makin’ their own way… It’s very healthy to see that, and it just shows that no matter your age, lifestyle or where you come from, you can follow your dreams and make it.”
Wyatt says he finds “inspiration in the weirdest places”. The new EP’s ‘Old Habits’, for example, which depicts a relationship ruined by addiction, is actually based on Robin Wright’s character, Jenny, in the movie Forrest Gump. 2024’s ‘Riches to Rags’, another tale of a relationship gone awry, came to him when he was watching an episode of the reality TV show Dance Moms.
Credit: Rachel Billings for NME
“We were in school,” he recalls, “and we’d just done with a math test. The girls were watching something on a smart board and there was a dance number called ‘Riches to Rags’. I thought, ‘That’s such a badass title.’” Wyatt’s been in one serious relationship, but many of his songs of heartbreak, he explains, are pure fantasy. If so, they’re rendered with a novelist’s razor-sharp emotional intelligence.
Curiously, he’s also cited Eminem as an influence. He certainly shares Slim Shady’s gift for storytelling, if little else. What did he take from the Detroit rapper? “Eminem,” Wyatt says, “pardon my French, but he doesn’t give two shits about what people think and that’s cool, you know? That’s badass. There’s gonna be haters out there and if there ain’t nobody hatin’ on you, you’re not really successful in the first place.” After a beat, he adds: “I mean, the less hate, the better! But there’s always gonna be hate somewhere out there.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone hating on Wyatt, who took his chance, dropped his actual surname of Potter (Wyatt is really his middle name) and capitalised on fame generated by a song he wrote after a long day of labouring for Charley’s General Construction. Astonishingly, he’d never even been to a gig before Wyatt Flores’ agent invited him to the singer’s show at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after ‘Everything Under the Sun’ blew up last year.
Credit: Rachel Billings for NME
When he was younger, he says, his family “didn’t really have the time or the money [for concerts]”. “I’m not saying we grew up poor,” he explains. “We didn’t grow up rich, but I wouldn’t say we grew up in a cardboard box or anything like that. We grew up in a pretty nice house; I have hard-workin’ parents, you know? We had some good money comin’ in, but we just really didn’t have the time and we couldn’t really plan to.”
Now, Wyatt has Flores’ number in his phone and enjoys swapping updates in a Snapchat group with fellow TikTok country stars such as Hudson Westbrook and Tyler Nance. What’s his level of ambition: to be a stadium-filling sensation like Zach Bryan, or simply to attain a steady fanbase and play 1,800-capacity rooms like the one he saw Wyatt Flores in?
At first, he claims not even to understand the meaning of the word “ambition”. When the question is simplified to ‘Bryan or Flores’, though, he grins, knowing he has the answer all figured out: “I wanna be Waylon Wyatt.”
Waylon Wyatt’s ‘Out Of The Blue’ is out now via Music Soup/Darkroom Records.
Listen to Waylon Wyatt’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Jordan Bassett
Photography: Rachel Billings
Grooming: Charley McEwen
Styling: Brian Conway
Styling Assistance: Ahmad Alek
Label: Music Soup/Darkroom Records
