“Fancy Like” launched Walker Hayes into the stratosphere. The show he’s bringing to Packard Music Hall on Saturday takes him back to his roots.

Hayes is stripping down his country hits and his back catalog for an acoustic show. Last week, a couple of days before the first date on the 18-city tour, he talked about what audiences can expect and his latest album, “17 Problems.”

The tour was inspired by a longtime Nashville tradition — the writers round — where songwriters will play their songs and share the stories behind them. It’s the kind of gig Hayes played often in those pre-“Fancy Like” days as a country singer-songwriter trying to get noticed and stand out in a crowded field.

“I just cultivated this love and this gift of the storytelling part with the song,” Hayes said. “Then, when ‘Fancy Like’ popped off, it was just all big band, big production, just banger after banger, and I kind of forgot about that phase of my life. My team came up with the idea of this tour. And to tell you, quite honestly, it was a little nerve wracking, because it was like, how do you go back from dancing around on stage and the lights and the full band and the full production, how do you back it up and do this again? I kind of forgot how to work out this muscle.

“We’ve had a couple rehearsals, and it’s just very natural settling back into the storytelling of all these songs. And it’s fun to just relive. I’ve been in Nashville 21 years. My wife and I, we started dating almost 30 years ago. So it’s just fun to relive all those memories with this music.”

Another inspiration for the tour was seeing Bruce Springsteen’s solo show on Broadway. Hayes didn’t know much about Springsteen beyond the hits and went at the invitation of Shane McAnally, a songwriter and producer Hayes has worked with over the years. What impressed him most is that Springsteen didn’t talk at all about his career; the focus stayed on personal stories.

“I really got swept away by him as a human and not so much a superstar,” Hayes said, and it influenced how he wants to tell his story. “It’s kind of that type of show, where it covers a lot of time, and it’s a wild rollercoaster of a ride to where we are today. I think a lot of people don’t really know those rises and falls. They know the obvious one, but the little ones in between are pretty significant as well. So they’re going to get a crazy story, and hopefully they’ll relate in some way.”

Those falls include Hayes’ battle with alcoholism (he’s been sober since 2015 and now partners with Athletic on a nonalcoholic beer) and the death of one of his daughters shortly after she was born in 2018.

The rise everyone knows about is “Fancy Like,” which topped the Billboard country charts, peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, won a 2022 Billboard Music Award for top country song and earned a Grammy nomination in the same category.

“It was quite a jump,” Hayes said. “That’s kind of what we’re stepping back from with this tour. I don’t think people realize I’m a guy who went from playing clubs — 500, maybe 1,000 people — to playing at halftime at the Chiefs and Bengals game or attending the Grammys with my wife … I went from basically playing parking lot shows that would only allow 25 cars because of COVID, and then fast forward one year and I’m headlining the Houston Rodeo, and that’s like 80,000 people.”

Hayes still was working last week on the setlist, which he described as looking like one of those boards on a crime drama with lines connecting different suspects and different pieces of evidence. And there’s plenty from which to choose. Hayes signed his first major label recording deal more than decade before “Fancy Like.” His first top 40 hit — just barely, peaking at #40 — came in 2011 with “Pants.” Hayes plans to revisit some of the songs he released in the 2010s on three volumes of EPs he dubbed “8Tracks.”

“Those are songs that gained me a lot of fans early on,” Hayes said. “There’s a song about each kid. There’s a song called ‘Halloween.’ There’s a song called ‘Beautiful’ that talks about when (his wife) Laney and I were reunited after a long break up. They’re deeper cuts, but when they came out, they were what I toured at that time. I think a lot of my die-hards will know them, but I think a lot of people will be interested in these songs and the stories they tell.”

But he also expects the setlist to be fluid, and without a big production behind him, it will be easy to change things up from night to night.

“People in the crowd, they would shout out songs, and I would think, ‘Man, I want these people to get what they came for as well as some stuff that they maybe didn’t expect.’ I doubt any nights will be the same. I mean, it’s going to be very intimate, and I’m just going to kind of follow the crowd and how they’re feeling.”

Hayes mostly will play guitar and occasionally switch to keyboard. Two of his children will join him on stage.

“My son, Baylor, he’s playing drums or percussion and then my daughter Loxley is singing as well. She sings a few verses here and there and a lot of backup vocals. So it’s a little bit of a family band thing.”

Hayes also will include songs from his latest album, “17 Problems,” released in August. “17 Year Old Problems,” which not only inspired the title but also the decision to include 17 songs on the record, came late in the recording process.

“It seems like ’17 Year Old Problems’ is definitely a nucleus song,” he said. “It kind of touches on every single thing that the other songs explore, and so it almost became like a table of contents for this album, something to tie it all together. Before that, we were gonna call it ‘Pocket Knife’ or ‘Neon Nights’ (after other songs on the record), just something generic, and then that number, it just seems so right.”

If you go …

WHO: Walker Hayes and Harper Grace

WHEN: 6 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: Packard Music Hall, 1703 Mahoning Ave. NW, Warren

HOW MUCH: Tickets range from $25 to $75 and are available at the Packard box office and through Ticketmaster.