In 2004, Hayes released Love in the Ruins, written after she had learned to play the guitar. The record shows the strong songwriting for which she is known and a capricious rough-edged quality evocative of her first record with a rootsier, Americana sound. She has taught at the Berklee College of Music, the Stanford Jazz Workshop, the REO Songwriting Retreat outside of Vancouver B.C, the ASCAP workshops in Los Angeles, and at the WCS Conference at Foothill College. In 2013, Hayes became chair of the songwriting department at Berklee in Boston. In 2022, she returned to the Bay Area to found a youth All Star Songwriting Program at Blue Bear School of Music.
