The Oklahoma singer-songwriter turns heartbreak into healing on his most adventurous and emotionally revealing album to date.
Wyatt Flores has never been afraid to confront fear in his songwriting, and on Scared Of Heights (out July 31), that practice is more prevalent than ever, albeit with a sonic twist.
After moving to Nashville in 2022, the then-22-year-old quickly grew frustrated being placed in writing rooms alongside folks he didn’t click with, so much that he wanted to be done with it altogether after dropping Welcome To The Plains in 2024.
“I’d been in the studio multiple times while also juggling time on the road and had gotten burnt out from it all, so it took me a while to start writing again,” explains Flores.
But that all changed last June when he joined Post Malone and Jelly Roll’s stadium tour in support of the just-released F-1 Trillion, where he first met Charlie Handsome and Jacob “JKash” Hindlin (Dua Lipa), both of whom Flores would soon find himself working with on Scared Of Heights. According to Flores, he first got to hanging out with the duo off the cuff before realizing who they were and the possibility of teaming up, which only helped songs like “Not Good Enough” and “Runnin’ On E” come to life with ease once they did sit down with intention.
“The most fun part was being able to get my creativity out there because a lot of times I’ve had to sit back since I didn’t know how to talk and express what I was after,” recalls Flores. “This was the first record where I didn’t hesitate to speak up and where things didn’t feel forced — it all happened very naturally.”
While the record does contain upbeat, cheerful moments like the rock’n country banger “Drive All Night” — an anthem about speeding through the dark to be with your lover — it’s by and large a breakup album that is ripe with vulnerability, questioning one’s self-worth and yearning for a brighter future. After being seen mostly as a guy who sings with an acoustic guitar on his earlier work, Flores opens up on Scared Of Heights by bringing his red dirt sound on tunes like “South Dakota” together with punk rock angst (“Not Good Enough”), early 2000s indie rock (“How To Let Me Go”), pop country hooks (“Sober For A Month”) and sentimental songwriter ballads ("Half The Man”) to present a colorful canvas of influences that collectively chart the young Okie’s growth.
“I was putting so much effort into something that wasn’t working and wasn’t putting anything into myself,” admits Flores. “That’s where everything spun out, so I had to relearn how to do all that and love myself again, which has been quite the journey.”
One of the album's most desperate pleas comes on the closing track, “Tulsa And Eleanor”. The heartbreaking missive tells the story of a man who keeps choosing the bottle over his partner and “letting go of the one thing he needed the most” in what Flores describes as the biggest olive branch to his earlier music on the entire album.
“It’s one of the sadder songs I’ve ever written and stems from a night terror I had last May where I woke up after imagining being shot in the head,” describes Flores. “One day I was writing about something else and that story came up, turning the writing room into a therapy session in the process. From there it turned into a story about my struggles with alcohol and how I don’t want to quit drinking, I just want to be able to not do it for the wrong reasons.”
Another disorienting song is title track “Scared Of Heights”, a harmonic adventure that sees Flores’ layered vocals mimicking an echo as if he’s atop a skyscraper shouting about how he’s afraid of taking chances on himself because he’s “scared of fallin’”. Per Flores, the idea for the song (and album) title stemmed from a conversation with a stranger on a Colorado ski lift months before when the person looked over to him and asked “Are you scared of heights, or are you scared of falling?”
“When we finished writing it I knew that’s what I wanted to name the album because when you go into a new relationship you have to be scared, or at least willing to know that you could get hurt again,” says Flores. “That’s what stuck out to me because I was scared to come back into music, scared to go back home, scared to let my band down and scared to let myself down. But then I realized that even if you’re scared of falling, that going for the climb is still what life’s all about.”
Wyatt Flores is on tour this fall in support of ‘Scared Of Heights’ and in opening slots for The Red Clay Strays and Koe Wetzel. For details visit WyattFloresMusic.com.
PHOTOGRAPHY: (All images) courtesy of the artist.
