Lainey Wilson was born and raised in Baskin, La., population 210. Her dad is a fifth-generation farmer. “We grew corn, wheat, soybeans, oats. We did cotton back in the day,” she said proudly in a recent interview. While her ascent to country-music stardom means that her family’s finances are secure, she noted that lately there’s been a lack of rainfall in the northeast part of the state. “This year’s going to be pretty rough,” she added. “Farming has a lot of ups and downs. It’s very similar to the music business.”
After years of struggle in Nashville, where she was repeatedly told she was “too country for country,” things are decidedly looking up for the 32-year-old singer-songwriter. In November, Wilson took home five Country Music Association Awards, including album of the year for her breakthrough, “Bell Bottom Country.” She also won the night’s most prestigious honor, entertainer of the year, beating out stadium-filling acts like Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs, and becoming the first woman to win that prize since Taylor Swift in 2011.
“It’s like I’ve been running for mayor for the past 13 years,” Wilson said of the relentless hustle required to land a publishing deal, to say nothing of scoring hits both solo and as a duet partner, a scene-stealing role on TV’s “Yellowstone” and now, a major C.M.A. achievement. She recalled the six-hour drives to gigs where the bar’s staff was the only audience, endless auditions in front of po-faced music executives, dispiriting meet-and-greets with radio programmers. “People could have cared less about me,” Wilson said with a good-natured smile. “I guess I was just too naïve to quit.”
“I have always been blown away by Lainey’s work ethic,” Combs said in an email. The country star used to write songs with Wilson in her camper trailer, back when they were both Nashville greenhorns. “She’s impossible not to root for,” he added.
Wilson had taken a couple of days off from a cross-country tour in support of her Aug. 23 album, “Whirlwind,” to attend the Los Angeles premiere of the summer blockbuster “Twisters.” Its soundtrack features her wistful “Out of Oklahoma,” a ruminative ballad about never forgetting where you came from (“And if I ever get a little too far/I remember where I left my heart”).
For the afternoon, Wilson was about as far from Baskin as one can get. On the verdant patio of a luxury hotel, dressed in a blue vintage western jumpsuit and trucker cap, she was shooting the breeze with the “Twisters” actor Glen Powell, who was movie-star aglow and clutching his celebrity rescue dog Brisket, fresh from a photo shoot for Dogue magazine.
A few hours later, tucked into an S.U.V., she was en route to her first-ever movie premiere, where she would walk the red carpet with Powell and the “Twisters” cast. Wilson had changed into a fitted black Roberto Cavalli “Nudie”-style suit sans shirt, and as her social media assistant rolled camera, she chatted about her recent gig performing “Dead Flowers” with the Rolling Stones (“I didn’t get booed!”) and the dangers of a wardrobe malfunction in front of paparazzi. “These things can be stressful,” she said with a honeyed twang. “Got to be careful your boobs don’t fall out.”
As her new album title suggests, Wilson is still sorting through her feelings about her newfound status in the upper echelon of country music. She spent much of her 20s honing her writing voice on scrappy independent albums and waiting out the bro-country wave that dominated Nashville. When success came in 2020, with her first No. 1 country single, “Things a Man Oughta Know,” it felt both deeply earned and all-at-once. “I still feel like me,” she said, “but my life has definitely changed.”
When asked whom she considers her peer group in Nashville, she cited the established stars Ashley McBryde and Miranda Lambert (“Miranda’s my country music big sister”) before reeling off a list of veteran female singer-songwriters who have been out there “grinding,” as she put it, for years: Kasey Tyndall, Ashland Craft, Meghan Patrick, Jenna LaMaster, Faren Rachels, Mae Estes.
“Those are my girls,” she said. “Their stuff is just as good, if not better, than a lot of the music you’re hearing right now. It’s a damn shame. They deserve to be heard.”
Nashville has long marginalized women and artists of color. While streaming has usurped some of the power held by a cadre of (white male) radio programmers — witness the Nigerian American act Shaboozey scoring a No. 1 country and pop hit with “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” — there is still the prevailing sense that the country music industry makes room for only one woman at a time at the top of the charts, if that.
In this decade, Wilson has crashed Music Row’s boys’ club: On Billboard’s radio-focused Country Airplay chart, she’s landed seven Top 5 hits as a solo or featured artist, including four No. 1’s. Currently, though, the 10 highest positions on that chart are all held by men, some of whom are largely unknown outside country radio circles. (Wilson’s “Hang Tight Honey,” the breakneck lead single from “Whirlwind,” sits at No. 13.)
Wilson believes that Nashville is “changing daily” and becoming more inclusive, but there’s plenty of work still to be done. “I remember sitting on Ashley McBryde’s bus about five years ago,” she said. “I was opening for her, just me and my guitar. And she told me, ‘Lainey, I believe in you. I love you. I want to help pull you over the wall. But you’ve got to promise me that you’ll do the same once you make it over.’ And that’s what it’s going to take, right? We have to help each other over the wall.
“I’m hoping and praying that it switches back to ’90s country music, when so many women were taking charge,” Wilson added. “I tell Luke and Morgan all the time, the girls are coming for you.”
On songs like the soaring 2022 track “Heart Like a Truck,” and on hard-nosed duets that explore sin and redemption (Jelly Roll’s “Save Me”) and domestic violence and retribution (Hardy’s “Wait in the Truck”), Wilson staked out a tough-but-tender persona — a romantic survivor with cowgirl cred, carried by a voice that can convey ache and mettle in equal measure.
“She speaks up in her music for the girls, for love, for the regular good ol’ folks, and I love that,” Lambert said in an email.
Not long ago, Wilson was trying to cope with online trolls who were fixated on the size of her backside, as captured in a TikTok user’s concert video. Wilson said she looks up to Dolly Parton, “and I thought, How would she deal with this? She’d probably just laugh it off and be like, ‘It’s been back there the whole time.’” But, she conceded, “it was a hard pill for me to swallow. Miranda’s had to deal with similar stuff. You just don’t see that happening with my dude friends in the industry.”
Lambert, who guest stars on the slow-burning “Whirlwind” track “Good Horses,” said she gave to Wilson the same advice she gives herself: “I don’t care what strangers behind a keyboard have to say about my appearance because music is what I’m here to do,” she said. “That’s our legacy.”
Another person who’s helped Wilson navigate fame is her boyfriend Devlin Hodges, a former N.F.L. quarterback known as Duck. The two met on a blind date in 2021 — they went bar crawling, she said, “then did some two-stepping. It was my kind of date” — and went public at the 2023 Academy of Country Music Awards. “He spent from age, like, 5 through his adult life chasing a dream,” she said. “So we have that mutual understanding.”
On the delightfully corn pone “Counting Chickens” from the new album, Wilson writes playfully but earnestly about domestic bliss (“I’m loving counting chickens with you”), even shouting out her beau in the song’s fade-out. “I had to kiss a bunch of frogs along the way,” she said with a grin, “but I’m in a happy, healthy relationship, and I write what I know.”
Wilson doesn’t have much time these days for chicken counting. Last year, she and her band played some 180 shows, and while they’ve slowed down some in 2024, Wilson is an admitted workaholic. In addition to the new album and tour, she recorded duets with the Black Crowes, Post Malone and Wynonna, and took the stage with Wallen, Jelly Roll, Keith Urban and one of her ’90s heroes, Terri Clark. She was inspired by Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. “I mean, watching her do that for four hours? She’s never gonna half-ass something. I respect her so much.”
Wilson said that for her previous albums, she would “write 100, 200 songs to get my 12,” but because of the demands on her time, she had to be more “intentional” for “Whirlwind.” “It’s, like, quality over quantity at this point.” Her longtime producer, Jay Joyce, saw in Wilson a newfound equanimity. “She really knows who she is now,” he said in an email.
Wilson agreed, to a point. “When people like Dolly and Reba and Randy Travis and Mick Jagger kind of wrap their arms around you and say, ‘I believe in you,’ it definitely gives you a boost of confidence.” Still, “it’s hard to cancel out all the noise that’s going on around you.”
Wilson said that she’s trying to get better at practicing self-care. “I’m, like, forcing myself to really pause. I have this app on my phone, actually, called Pause.” She showed off the mindfulness message that appears on her screen atop a nature scene: “Jesus, I give everyone and everything to you.”
“It’s like meditation,” she said. “It helps keep me centered. This is all important” — she gestured at the scene on the hotel patio, a stand-in for what she’s finally managed to achieve — “but at the end of the day, I’ve got to keep my feet on the ground.” She took a moment and slipped her phone away. “So I can keep going.”
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