Meet Amber

Stepping center stage as leading lady Kathy Twitty in the acclaimed musical production, It’s Only Make Believe, Amber Hayes knew she was treading on hallowed ground.  Playing the daughter of legendary Country singer Conway Twitty to packed theater audiences across the country was a job the gifted singer took to heart.

“Conway Twitty, and all the great traditionalists - I have such great respect for what they did.  Musically, they built the road that led us to where we are today,” Amber acknowledges.  And while she’s traveled a long way from her rural Oklahoma origins, Amber has always made it a point to stick close to that path of tradition.

Even as a young girl, Amber was a standout talent.  She was named one of “America’s Ten Most Beautiful Children” by Globe Magazine and was selected as a finalist for Disney’s “The Mickey Mouse Club,” along with Pop music sensations Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears.  “As exciting as that was,” Amber recalls of her near brush with child stardom, “at the time I couldn’t imagine leaving home for Orlando and splitting up my family.”

With its 1,200 residents and zero stoplights, Amber’s hometown of Weleetka, Oklahoma, would prove to be a grounding force in the young performer’s life.  Amber was influenced early on by Country music, gravitating towards the show-stopping divas that would quickly become her role models:  Barbara Mandrell, Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire.  

“Reba would play in Tulsa and Oklahoma City every year, and I would always go to both shows,“ Amber remembers.  “It was a total experience, rather than just a concert, and that’s something I want to give people in my career.”  

Amber would later meet some of Country music’s founding mothers, including Grand Ole Opry member Jean Shepard, who attended one of Amber’s performances as a teenager.  Thoroughly impressed by what she saw and heard, Shepard promptly invited Amber to be her guest on “Ernest Tubb’s Midnight Jamboree” in Nashville.  Since then, Amber has also shared the stage with legends like Jeannie Seely and Helen Cornelius.  “Getting to learn from some of the most influential women of Country music is a privilege,” says Amber.  “I’ve tried to soak in everything I can from them.”

Amber fell in love with Nashville and the Opry community, making the decision to move to Music City just weeks after her high school graduation.  “As soon as my mom left after settling me in, I cried and cried for hours,” Amber says.  “I was so homesick I drove right back to Oklahoma the next day.”  

Two weeks later, Amber returned to Nashville, and this time it was to stay.  She started college, studying communications and the music business.  She also began writing songs.  After only two years of college, Amber opened a fitness company for women, selling it three years later with enough profit to support her music endeavors full time.  

Amber began booking herself in casinos and clubs and auditioning for every opportunity that came her way.  She landed the lead role in the Nashville dinner theater musical, “Spitfire Grill,” and was voted by local television viewers into the leading role in “Could It Be Love” at the Ryman Auditorium with Opry member Jeannie Seely.  In 2006, she landed a part in “The Vagina Monologues,” starring Seely and Mandy Barnett.  

Yet it was when she beat out 1,000 hopefuls in an open audition for her part in the Conway Twitty musical, It’s Only Make Believe, that Amber landed the role of a lifetime.  The play debuted to a sold out crowd at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, and went on to tour for a year, with an extended engagement in Branson, Missouri.  “This show gave me bigger opportunities than I’d ever had before,” Amber says.  “We were on the road, opening for George Jones, playing in arenas in front of thousands of people.  You never know what’s going to happen on stage, and you learn to be comfortable with that.”

The Conway Twitty production was a great launching pad for Amber’s career, but her true ambition was always to be a solo Country artist.  During her yearlong tour with the musical, Amber managed to record her debut EP, C’mon, during off time in Nashville.  The album features six songs co-written by Amber, most of which came out of a California writer’s retreat with Brian Pharoah and guitarist Bill Diluigi.

Infused with a down-home Country sound accented with fiddle and steel guitar, C‘mon was the outlet that allowed Amber to get personal in a way that musical theater never did.  Her energy shines through in the album’s Top 40 debut single, the innocently flirtatious “C’mon,” while “Can’t Take It Back” reveals the singer’s more sensitive side.  The true-to-life narrative “Right as Rain” invokes the tiny town where Amber was raised and her struggles in deciding to leave it.  The second single from C’mon is the powerful and yearning “Wait,” a song which provides the inspiration behind Amber’s first music video, shot by three-time CMT Director of the Year, Steven Goldmann.  

“’Wait’ is a song that was written about bumping into someone at the grocery store or coffee shop,” Amber explains.  “You kind of have this moment with a stranger in a public place, and then you find yourself wondering if it was meant to be something more than just this random meeting.  It’s about that moment of indecision where you either take a chance, or you wait and pass it up.” 

Fortunately, Amber Hayes took a chance of a lifetime that day she returned to Nashville to follow her dreams, and there’s no doubt that is exactly where she is meant to be.