Lainey Wilson reveals the secret behind country music’s global takeover
After years of struggle, country music queen Lainey Wilson is now a global powerhouse and counts some of music’s biggest stars as friends.
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Looking out at the sold-out crowds at her first Australian shows in March, America’s new queen of country Lainey Wilson had an out-of-body moment.
“I cannot believe somebody on the other side of the world relates to a girl from a town of 200 people,” she said.
“It gives me a lot of peace; I mean that makes me feel like we’re all actually a lot more like than you think. And there’s something really beautiful about that.
“But it was also surreal, it was just hard for me to wrap my head around that. The year before we were doing a club tour in the States and next thing we’re selling out (arenas) in Australia.”
The young woman who left her tiny rural town of Baskin, Louisiana in 2011 to chase her country music dream in Nashville is now a chart-topping global star who hasn’t had many moments to contemplate everything that has happened in the past years.
She has won every big prize from the Grammy for Best Country Album to five Country Music Association Awards, for her breakthrough, Bell Bottom Country including Entertainer of the Year, the first female artist to claim that trophy since Taylor Swift in 2011.
Back home in Nashville for one of the 15 days she will sleep in her own bed this year, Wilson is filling her tour day off with interviews to herald her new record, appropriately titled Whirlwind.
It’s been a big week in a huge year for the 32-year-old star. She and Keith Urban released the video of Go Home W U, their collaboration for his new record High.
The country music stars are close friends with Wilson posting a TikTok video of him driving her to the airport for her flight to Australia in March.
“He’s a good driver. He has become a dear friend of mine … him and Nicole both have been great people to have in my corner,” she said.
“If Keith Urban thinks you can do it, you can do it.”
Post Malone also knows Wilson has the country music Midas touch right now. He invited her to the Grand Ole Opry to launch his new country record F-1 Trillion and perform their duet Nosedive.
The day before, she experienced a full circle career moment when she performed the Hannah Montana theme Best of Both Worlds to honour Miley Cyrus at the Disney Legends Ceremony. As a teenager, Wilson played birthday parties as a Hannah Montana impersonator.
“Miley, you might not know this but I am truly one of your biggest fans. My very first job was taking my portable sound system and a wig … and impersonating Hannah Montana,” she told Cyrus at the awards.
I got the best of both worlds that’s for sure🌎 From performing as Hannah Montana on flat bed trailers at birthday parties to honoring the legend herself…now that right there is what ya call a full circle moment. @MileyCyrus you’re such an inspiration. Thank you for letting me… pic.twitter.com/qvdgZ3CHDu
— Lainey Wilson (@laineywilson) August 12, 2024
No doubt there will be a collaboration between these two superstars in the near future.
But this week it will be all about Wilson, an artist whose overnight success took a decade.
Wilson has been at the vanguard of American country music’s next wave and its takeover of airwaves and stages far, far away from Nashville.
Tickets to see the 32-year-old musician, who also stars in Kevin Costner’s neo-Western drama series Yellowstone, at CMC Rocks in Queensland in March, and her four side shows in Sydney and Melbourne sold out in mere minutes.
While shocked to find an adoring fanbase 14,000km from home, Wilson knows why Country’s Cool Again, which also happens to be the title of a song on her new record.
“I think it’s about storytelling,” she said from her Nashville home.
“When I think back to being a little girl in my town of 200 people, I think about sitting around the kitchen table and hearing my parents tell the same old stories they’d been telling for years but I’d still be saying ‘Hey, tell that story about the alligator’. And I would hear something in it that I didn’t the last time.
“Or I’d get excited about the part that I knew was coming up. Whether it made me laugh or cry, or brought me peace, I wanted to do that, to make people feel that same way.
“Like people have said ‘I love you’ a million ways but there’s a song on the record called Counting Chickens and that’s about saying I love you, while counting chickens.”
Wilson’s music is rooted in country music tradition and shares the same homespun philosophy as the legendary Dolly Parton, one of the idols whose career inspired the teenager singer and songwriter to move to Nashville.
The country music capital is tough to crack; it’s known in the business as the 10-year town because it can take that long for an outsider to get a record deal.
Wilson survived seven years of rejection, ironically told by the industry gatekeepers that her songs and her sound were “too country.” Growing up in a hardscrabble farming community steeled her with the grit to weather the setbacks and maintain her unshakeable belief in her talent.
Her faith and hustle were rewarded in 2020, with her first No. 1 country single, Things a Man Oughta Know and then she gatecrashed Nashville’s Music Row boys’ club in 2022 with her fourth album Bell Bottom Country.
The songs for Whirlwind were written during a one week writer’s retreat with her favourite Music Row songwriters and finished by bringing them to wherever she was on tour.
“Some folks over at my label had said to me ‘If you’re going to see much of your family you’re probably going to have to get them to fly out to come see you and I knew in that moment I wasn’t going to have much time in Nashville too,” she said.
“(Before) I used to spend five or six days a week on Music Row and write several hundreds songs a year but for this one we had the writer’s retreat here and other times, it was bringing the writers out on the road, which was cool to pull them out of their comfort zone and finding inspiration, to see new things in random places.”
Wilson will be back in the tour bus in America for the rest of 2024, with a return to Australia likely next year. She can’t wait to get back into “shoey” practice.
“I did it every night in Australia and when we got back over to the States I was like ‘Can I keep doing my shoey?’”
Whirlwind is out on August 23 and is available for pre-order or pre-save on streamers.
Country’s Big Hits
There’s a stampede of new records coming from country music’s biggest names – and some pop stars.
Post Malone – His country music album F1-Trillion features a jawdropping list of guests including Dolly Parton, Chris Stapleton and Hank Williams Jr and has already owned the pop charts with I Had Some Help, featuring Morgan Wallen, Pour Me A Drink with Blake Shelton.
Keith Urban – The Australian superstar releases his 11th studio album High on September 20. He has already shared five singles from the record – Messed Up As Me, Straight Line, Go Home W U with Lainey Wilson, Wildside and Heart Like A Hometown.
Miranda Lambert – As well as featuring on Lainey Wilson’s record on the track Good Horses, the revered singer songwriter releases her 10th record Postcards from Texas on September 13.
Luke Bryan – The country music stream king – he has 24 billion global plays of his enviable catalogue – drops his eighth album Mind of A Country Boy on September 27.
Kasey Chambers – Her 13th studio album Backbone, out on October 4, is a companion piece to her new book Just Don’t Be A Dickhead.
Kelsea Ballerini – The American star already shared a taster of her upcoming record Patterns (out October 25) with the single Cowboys Cry Too featuring Noah Kahan, everyone’s favourite pop co-star in 2024.
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Originally published as Lainey Wilson reveals the secret behind country music’s global takeover
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