Midweek Notes - August 5 2026: Waylon Wyatt, Wyatt Flores

Waylon Wyatt. Wyatt Flores. Easy to tell them apart: one is from Arkansas and sounds like Zach Bryan; the other is from Oklahoma and has been praised to the hilt by his fellow singers, not least Cody Canada, who predicted enormous things for him.

‘To write and arrange the music he’s playing at his age!’ Canada said admirably of him when I spoke to him for Country Music People magazine in spring 2025. ‘He’s a sweet human being, and in my personal opinion I think he’s going to be one of these artists from Oklahoma that’s going to be talked about for the next 30 years.’ Like Canada and his band Cross Canadian Ragweed, Wyatt Flores is from Stillwater, the town in Oklahoma which also brought us Garth Brooks.

Another admirer is Charles Wesley Godwin, who used Flores on his song Hey There Son on his new album Christian Name (you can read about it in my cover interview with Godwin in this month’s edition of Country Music People magazine). Flores was due to play shows in the UK in 2024 but took a break that spring due to exhaustion. Instead he came over twice in 2025, solidifying his European fanbase in March at Country2Country and supporting 49 Winchester at their show in October at the Camden Roundhouse.

His new album, Scared of Heights, is his second, after 2024’s Welcome to the Plains; he is still an Island Records artist but has moved to the reactivated MCA imprint, which also boasts 49 Winchester, as well as acts as varied as Jordan Davis, Carter Faith and Jon Pardi. MCA also houses some legends of the country genre, not least Brad Paisley, Alan Jackson, Luke Bryan, Little Big Town, Miranda Lambert and Vince Gill.

Flores had a hand in every track on this album, writing he title track (“I’m not scared of heights, I’m just scared of falling”) with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show and the album’s two producers: Charlie Handsome aka Ryan Vojtesak, who has written the monolithic hits for Morgan Wallen; and Jacob ‘J Kash’ Kasher, who has parlayed a career writing pop songs in LA for Maroon 5 and Charlie Puth into being a reliable collaborator with Nashville artists, including Flores and Willow Avalon. How interesting that the young man from Oklahoma is getting this kind of outside help, but MCA need a return on their investment and Flores needs to reach an enormously wide audience to do so.

Vojtesak and Kasher also wrote the album’s two best songs, Runnin’ on E and Half The Man. The first of these has been hammered on Apple Music Country, thanks to a nagging chorus that recalls the best recent work of Koe Wetzel, who is also not averse to writing with pop composers. The latter song deals in coping with young adulthood, one of the album’s main themes. The mandolin intro to that song is played by session wizard Bryan Sutton, while Tom Bukovac layers his first-call session guitar parts across songs like the fist-pumping Not Good Enough (“I’m addicted to being drunk in love”) which featured in Flores’ 2025 UK setlist.

He opened his shows with the album’s closing track Tulsa and Eleanor, an acoustic ballad which he co-wrote with Jessie Jo Dillon, one of Nashville’s premiere songwriters, while Joe Spivey adds his world-class fiddle across the album too. He played the opening riff of Seminole Wind by John Anderson, and he was one of the four Bow Bros whose work can be heard on several tracks (Honey I’m Home and Man! I Feel Like a Woman! among them) on Come On Over by Shania Twain. That album came out before Flores was born, which must be frightening for Spivey.

Drive All Night gives its name to his summer headline tour, which will surely come to the UK in 2027. Sober For A Month has a Jelly Rollesque lyric and a Zach Bryanesque stomp, which is a curious melange. Sleepless Lullaby begins “Doctor doctor, something’s wrong”, while God Forgives (“but I don’t”) sounds like corporate rock from when Flores was in diapers in the mid-2000s. He has been known to cover How To Save A Life by The Fray in concert, a song which came out before he turned seven. There is some filler, like the fluffy The Way I Do, while the punchy, melodic chorus of How To Let Me Go is country radio catnip.

This is another album made in Nashville that works as a modern rock album as much as a country one. It should appeal to the kind of Koe Bro or Red Clay Strays acolyte that will be patiently waiting for their man to get onstage when Flores is supporting them later this year. Crucially, Scared of Heights has several songs that could become sizeable Hot 100 hits, and it would help his cause if he finally reached the Hot 100. MCA, after all, need to keep a talent like Wyatt Flores on their roster.

Waylon Wyatt, like John R Cash and Glen Campbell before him, is an Arkansas man. He is signed to Darkroom Records, a division of Interscope which also boasts Vincent Mason and Billie Eilish, which explains why Wyatt often covers the latter’s Birds of a Feather in concert. Depressed after the suicide of his brother, Wyatt found solace in the music of Tyler Childers, and he picked up a guitar to channel his creativity in the face of loss, as on his own composition Phoning Heaven.

Dustpiles is his debut album, following two EPs and a Country2Country visit. He includes a full band version of Everything Under the Sun, his breakout viral hit which he recorded for an EP in November 2024, which he made when he was 17. In March 2026, he drafted in Wyatt Flores for the standalone single Didn’t Forget, perhaps to prove that the pair are different people and have actually been in the same room together. Amazingly, the man born Waylon Wyatt Potter saw Flores as his first ever live show.

Across the album Waylon Wyatt has benefitted from the help of others, notably singer/songwriter Anderson East, who helped him write the acoustic ballad Wishful Thinking and Body Heat, which mentions the “season of freezing”. The chorus of Box of Bones benefits from the input of Steph Jones, a writer of some of Sabrina Carpenter’s smash hits.

I am unsurprised to learn that when Wyatt played Country2Country, he ran together In Loving Melody and Dead Man Walkin’, which are both instantly memorable. The former has a proper chorus and a warm arrangement full of clip-clop percussion, while the latter is rock’n’roll with a magnificent guitar part and a heavy backbeat. I like the riff at the start of Otherside and the way Leave It Alone kicks in after the first chorus. The Dress, meanwhile, is a love song which notes how “the dress may have gone out of style, but you never have”.

Some tracks, like 7 Minutes and Out of Place, are too indebted to Zach Bryan for comfort, but Waylon Wyatt definitely stands out among the many Zachalikes (Sam Barber, Noah Kahan, Big Machine signings The Jack Wharff Band). For a 19-year-old, this is a remarkable album; for any act, it is very good indeed. He’s booked to play Shepherd’s Bush Empire in November, having come over in 2025 to play Hyde Park on the undercard for Bryan’s show. He’ll be headlining arenas in no time, and ought to gain plenty of new fans thanks to this album.