Ward Hayden and Greg Hall of Ward Hayden & The Outliers Talk Reimagining Springsteen with Little By Little and Piece By Piece
Ward Hayden & The Outliers are currently on tour in Europe, having released their album Piece By Piece in late October, following an April 2025 release of its sister album, Little By Little. If you’re a Springsteen fan, you might recognize a lyrical reference in those titles, since both albums are reimagining of songs by Bruce Springsteen from throughout his career. The albums are a subtly chosen collection of the more bombastic hit songs, the more unassuming favorites, and the songs that for some, have never yet really hit home. It was into that vast musical territory that Ward Hayden (vocalist) and Greg Hall (bassist/producer) went, a copy of Springsteen’s autobiography in hand, to decide which songs resonated with them the most, and which held new discoveries for them.
It’s a project that Hayden and Hall had been thinking about for years, and while they worked on other albums, continued to gestate, but the move to actually begin choosing and recording tracks was prompted by the sense that we need unifying figures, and unifying music, in our lives now. We need to look to figures and messages with which we can broadly agree, and Springsteen’s public persona, as well as his deeply personal American storytelling, pretty well sums up that idea of bringing people together. I spoke with Ward Hayden and Greg Hall about their personal connection to the music and how they approached this fairly daunting task of making the music their own, alongside fellow members of the Outliers, guitarists Tyler Marshall and Samuel Crawford, and drummer Patrick Brown.
Americana Highways: This release is extra exciting for you because it’s the second part of a project, really, and now the project can be complete and out in the world.
Ward Hayden: Yes, we are so excited. We just got back from being in Sweden and Finland for about five weeks, doing a tour, and we’ve been home for a few weeks, and now Greg and I are getting ready to head back to Europe, in France, Belgium, and Spain for most of November. We get to go make music for people who love American Roots music.
AH: I heard about these tours that you’re doing, and they are pretty incredible. There are a lot of dates, close together. It’s a lot! I know there’s a huge European fanbase for American music, but just seeing your tour trajectory really confirms that.
Ward: I love that Americana and country music have a growing base overseas. People are really getting into it, and they are knowledgeable about American music history. I’ve actually been really impressed by how much great music that we’ve found over there. In Norway and Sweden, we’ve found really great bands. In Norway, they call it “Nordicana.” They’ve got their own version and it’s so cool. It’s mostly sung in English, which is also impressive.
Greg Hall: They are such great students, which is what I love to see, but not just students, they have really mastered the craft. It’s amazing to see how well versed they are in the things that we kind of take for granted, because we grew up in it. They are really doing something over there.
AH: I feel like with this album out, your bigger story is complete. Are you playing from these two albums?
Ward: On our last tour leg, we were peppering the songs here and there. Little by Little was out, but Piece by Piece wasn’t out yet. We actually pressed 200 copies of each record on limited edition white vinyl, and we got to say from the stage that we had something extra-special and people could get the albums there before anybody else. It went really well. People were really excited to get the records, and see what we’ve managed to do with these songs, and hear stories from the stage about how it all came together.
It was a very lengthy project for us. Greg and I started this project about two and a half years ago, with no plan, which is not something we are used to, or have ever done before. And may never do again! But we lost ourselves in it for a while, in a good way. We were having fun. Greg was saying how people in Scandinavia are students, but I felt like a student through the whole process of making this record. We just all dug in so deep.
It gave me a bigger understanding of Springsteen’s life and approach. He’s so giving of himself of himself and of his own stories in his music. Greg had given me a copy of Springsteen’s autobiography and that was so helpful. Reading that, we were trying to figure out what songs we wanted to do. Just knowing about some of the stuff that he had been through, and his relationship with his dad, gave a much greater meaning to a lot of the music.
AH: I live in New Jersey, and I live in Springsteen-land, which I’m very happy about. He really is the patron saint of New Jersey. You walk into a store and just hear people talking about him. And I’ve been privileged to see him live a few times now. It’s really special to see him playing here.
Ward: Oh, I bet! That’s so great.
AH: I feel like, as big as his legacy is, and how obvious is, it’s still coming into focus. It’s still something we’re trying to get perspective on.
Ward: Yes, all the way to the point of this movie being made about him. It could reach even more people than before, and I love that they chose the Nebraska era for the focus of the movie. With that album, it really was brave to do what he did at that time. Then, he followed that up with Born in the USA, and the rest is history. But to put out a stripped-down, barebones, pretty dark songwriter album, when you’re already Bruce Springsteen, is amazing. That would be brave even for a band like us, let alone Springsteen at that point in his career, when he’s a star, but is putting out something that he made on a four-track cassette recorder. It’s game changing. But like you said, I think his story is still unfolding, and growing, and he’s still going. There’s this new video of him, alone with his guitar, playing “Streets of Philadelphia.”
Greg: It’s so good!
Ward: It’s so vulnerable. He’s not playing perfectly, and that somehow makes it better. He’s willing to take risks, that are really admirable. Taking a risk inside a small club with 40 people takes guts, but to take risks when there are so many eyes on him, that’s profound. I really admire what he’s done and what he continues to do.
AH: I recall seeing his video interview with Howard Stern a couple of years ago, where it’s just a camera on him, and a guitar, and a piano, and I remember thinking, “I don’t know many people of his generation who would sit and do that.” It was so in-your-face for him.
Ward: It’s soul-baring. We saw him at Gillette Stadium in 2023, right before some of the tour dates got cancelled, and I never would have guessed he wasn’t feeling well. And I’d seen him in his younger career, where he was still doing the knee-slides, but I thought Gillette was so good. My big takeaway was that we were in a stadium of 60 to 65 thousand people, and it was generational. It was people there with their children, all the way down to their grandchildren, and it was people having the time of their lives. I don’t think I’ve ever felt feelings like that in that big of an environment before.
Greg: Like Ward said, we were talking about this project for years and years, and then we released other albums in the meantime, but it kept going. Of course we love his music, but you get to understand how much you love the man too, and that makes it even easier. We hear what he says and see what he does and we say, “Yeah, we’re there with him.” There’s no big thing that we don’t agree with. Bruce is a very thoughtful person.
Ward: Musically and in real life, he’s great.
AH: I’ve seen that multi-generational experience happening, too. He doubles down on the authenticity these days, and we need this right now. He’s here for that.
Ward: I agree. It’s a true tie that binds. It’s a person who, for decades, has had something meaningful to say, and to share his perspective. I don’t think now is a time to discard that. If anything, I hope his music can help people pause, take a step back, and listen. He’s somehow stayed a very human person.
AH: You mentioned Nebraska, and you do cover songs from Nebraska on both albums. On those songs, but on others too, when I hear your interpretation what really stands out is the storytelling. It’s just incredible. Each song is really about the story.
Ward: It is.
AH: When you hear these hits a lot, you get caught up in the energy of the big chorus, but something that you guys do, which is amazing, is that you put that story up-front.
Ward: That was really important for us. There were certainly songs that we tried, and didn’t record, or did record, and ended up scrapping. “Reason to Believe,” from Nebraska, was actually one of those songs, where I really, really wanted to do that song. That was always a favorite of mine, but we just couldn’t get it right. We couldn’t find our way to tell those stories, those little vignettes.
Then, on the very last day in the studio, the band wasn’t there, it was just Greg and I. Greg had his upright bass. We recorded it with upright bass and vocals, as stripped down as possible. What ended up being on the record is live in one take, with very minimal guitar strumming, led by the upright and the voice. That’s so those stories could be told. I had re-thought that song so many ways, but ultimately it just needed to stay raw. We ended up with 16 songs because of that one, and allowed us to split the collection to have eight songs on each record, so I feel like it was meant to be.
AH: I can’t believe that you almost didn’t do that one. I love that version. It’s so haunting, it’s so precise in its own personality, the way that it’s presented. I thought it was incredibly brave, that version.
Ward: Thank you. After two and a half years, it was the last song, and the last day. Even the last couple of hours.
Greg: Other songs were being mixed already before it got thrown in.
Ward: I was so happy because I wanted that song to be part of this. Ultimately, it almost needed me to stop thinking about it, and it needed to just happen spur-of-the-moment. Now, our challenge is that when we go to Spain coming up, every show is going to have two sets. The first set is going to be Outliers doing Springsteen songs off the record, and the second set will be Outliers originals, so we need to get that song ready.
We’ve actually never played that. Many of the other songs we’ve now played in front of a live audience. Spain is our proving ground for that one. We’ll have pedal steel, electric guitar, and drums, so that one might be a little different, or we might strip it way back to give a moment of quiet introspection.
AH: You really go there with the stripped-down approach on some songs in ways that I feel are like a high-wire act. On “Thunder Road,” it feels almost like your delivering poetry with these lyrics. The lyrics are totally in the spotlight.
Ward: Though I am now happily married, when I was in college, I dated a girl who was a Springsteen fanatic, and I like to joke, “I didn’t get the girl, but I got Springsteen.” She took my to my first Springsteen show, and I became a huge fan. It was a time of pirating on Napster, and there was a demo version of “Thunder Road” on there. It was the first time I’d heard the demo of “Thunder Road,” that’s just him and with his guitar. It’s now available elsewhere. There are some alternate lyrics, even.
With our version, it was one take. We wanted it to be, as you say, like a high wire act. We wanted to capture that feeling. I didn’t want anything to feel polished, since I was so influenced by his demo version, which is one take. It causes you, as a listener, to really hang in there, sometimes wondering if he’s going to make it. With our version, we had the whole band come crashing in at the end.
Originally, we thought we’d use it to close the record. But once we heard everything, we opted for “Stolen Car” to really bring it back down, to the songs, to the lyrics, to the storytelling, like we were talking about earlier. One thing that sets the second record apart from the first is that, to me, it feels like a songwriter, storytelling album, though they both have elements of that.
Thanks very much for chatting with us Ward Hayden and Greg Hall! You can find more information here on their website: https://www.wardhaydenandtheoutliers.com/
