Lainey Wilson's country music rise nothing short of a 'Whirlwind'

Lainey Wilson’s latest album is called Whirlwind.

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It’s an apt title for summing up what her life has been like after she rocketed to stardom in 2020 with her first No. 1 country single, Things a Man Oughta Know.

If you don’t know her story, Wilson, 32, achieved overnight fame after years of struggle in Nashville. Last November, the singer-songwriter won five Country Music Association Awards, including Album of the Year for her breakthrough, Bell Bottom Country, and Entertainer of the Year, becoming the first woman to win the prize since Taylor Swift in 2011 and  beating the likes of Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs.

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Earlier this year, Wilson won Best Country Album at the Grammys, the People’s Choice Award for Female Country Artist of The Year, a CMT Music Award for Female Video of The Year, and Female Artist of the Year and Entertainer of the Year at the 2024 Academy of Country Music Awards.

It’s all been, well, a whirlwind for an artist who spent the better part of a decade living in a trailer trying to make a name for herself in Nashville.

“Recently, every random conversation that I have with strangers, the word ‘Whirlwind’ would come up. That’s truly what my life has been for the past two years,” Wilson says in her honeyed Louisiana drawl. “I feel like my life has changed, but I haven’t.”

Her fans have already heard new music from her earlier this summer when her ballad Out of Oklahoma appeared on the Twisters soundtrack, but Wilson says the 14 songs on Whirlwind reflect her new frame of mind. The album’s first single, the rollicking Hang Tight Honey, is already a hit.

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“Writing and recording this record gave me a sense of home and feeling grounded during a time of my life that was constantly changing. And all of our lives, constantly change … Whatever it is, nothing ever stays the same. Whirlwind brought me a lot of peace during a really crazy time of my life,” Wilson says.

After she moved from small-town Baskin, Louisiana, to Nashville in 2011, Wilson endured almost a decade of struggles that included being rejected by American Idol on seven different occasions. 

“I heard ‘no’ a million times. But I was just crazy enough to think, ‘Well, I never would have had an opportunity to sit down and have a meeting with this person if one day it wasn’t going to be a yes,'” she says. “You have to be a little halfway insane to want to be in this business. You have to believe it when nobody else does. It took me years to find a team of people who genuinely believed in what I did. I feel like once I started finding those people, one at a time, it all started making sense.”

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Lainey Wilson, winner of the Entertainer of the Year award, Female Artist of the Year, and Music Event of the Year award for “Save Me,” poses in the press room during the 59th Academy of Country Music Awards at The Ford Center at The Star on May 16, 2024 in Frisco, Texas. Photo by Omar Vega /Getty Images

After eight years living in Nashville, Wilson got a record deal, but that’s when the work began. “That meant I had signed up to run the race,” she chuckles. “I prepared, then entered, and now I was about to run it. It’s been a journey. It was 10 years, almost to the day, when What a Man Oughta Know went to number one. They say Nashville is a 10-year town.”

In late 2022, her stock continued to rise when she appeared on the fifth season of Yellowstone. Along the way, she has collaborated with some of country’s biggest stars, including Jelly Roll (Save Me), Hardy (Wait in the Truck), Dolly Parton (Mama, He’s Crazy), Cole Swindell (Never Say Never), and many others. She had further viral moments when videos of her backside became a thing on TikTok.

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But after playing smaller clubs, she graduated to stadiums, opening for Luke Combs in 2023, before launching her own Country’s Cool Again arena tour, which continues into the fall.

Lainey Wilson performs on the TODAY show. Photo by Getty Images

On Whirlwind, Wilson sings with one of her idols, Miranda Lambert, on the smooth duet Good Horses. Her name also appears as a co-writer on all of the album’s 14 tracks. The stories fans will get to listen to reflect where she’s at now in her life. “This new chapter of music is the most cathartic and personal piece of art I’ve ever made,” she says.

“Since we put out Bell Bottom Country, I feel like the amount of places I have gone and people that I’ve gotten to meet; I feel like I’ve lived 10 years in two with the experiences that I’ve had,” Wilson says. “I think I’ve grown in a lot of ways and I’m getting to share a side of me that I didn’t even know I had.”

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She also describes Whirlwind as a little more “introspective” on songs like Counting Chickens (in which she playfully sings, “I’m loving counting chickens with you”) and the soulful ballad 4x4xu.

“I’m in a happy, healthy relationship … I write what I know,” she says, alluding to her boyfriend, former NFL quarterback Devlin “Duck” Hodges. “So, I’m hoping people hear this record and find a little peace in their whirlwind too, because everybody’s got their own whirlwind — good or bad.”

Louisiana-native Lainey Wilson is no overnight success. Photo by Matt Licari /AP Photo

If that wasn’t enough, she also hops on a track that features on Post Malone’s new country album and sings with the Black Crowes on their latest LP, Happiness Bastards. Earlier this summer, she joined the Rolling Stones onstage to sing their 1971 hit Dead Flowers. A few weeks later, she popped onstage with Morgan Wallen to sing Lies, Lies, Lies during a stop on his One Night at a Time tour in Kansas City.

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“It’s been really insane,” she says of her meteoric rise. “It wasn’t too long ago that I could barely sell a ticket. But I always had a feeling that if we threw it against the wall enough times, eventually it would stick. It’s a good feeling when people start to see what you always believed about yourself the whole time. It says to me, ‘OK, I wasn’t wrong.'”

Wilson says that on her previous records, she would write 100 songs and then whittle them down to 12. But because of her newfound fame, she had to be more focused for Whirlwind.

“They say you have your whole life to write your first record,” she says, smiling. “But I had to get to work right away (with longtime producer Jay Joyce, with whom she worked with on Bell Bottom Country and its predecessor, 2021’s Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’). I said, ‘These are the things I want to sing about. These are the things I want to say. These are the things I want to share.’ We just had to put our blinders on and get down to it.”

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Lainey Wilson hopes her new album brings listeners comfort. Photo by Getty Images

But after enduring endless auditions in front of stone-faced music executives and playing gigs to near-empty rooms, Wilson doesn’t have an “I-told-you-so” attitude to the naysayers.

“Even at nine years old, after my parents took me to the Grand Ole Opry, I knew I wanted to be in Nashville and I wanted to tell stories,” she says. “There were a few times where I should have packed it up and gone home. But it never crossed my mind. I was just naïve enough to think, ‘This is the only thing I know how to do and it’s the only thing I want to do.'”

And despite those dispiriting early years, she says that her teenage self, the one who moved to Music City with a few bucks in her pocket and stars in her eyes, wouldn’t be surprised that it all worked out for her in the end.

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“I think she’d believe it. There have been a few times people have said to me, ‘Can you believe this is happening?’ And the truth is, I can believe it,” Wilson says. “For the longest time I was the only one who did believe in it. Maybe I didn’t realize how insane it would be, but I knew that I was going to be telling my stories and I knew that there would be someone that wanted to listen to them.”

Lainey Wilson’s Whirlwind is out now.

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