Lainey Wilson Takes The Reins

The thing about a whirlwind, according to Lainey Wilson, is that you have to keep those who are close to you close to you, and always keep one foot on the ground. It’s sage advice coming from someone who knows exactly what it feels like to be in the thick of things.

Wilson sat down with Cowboys & Indians to talk about her new album, Whirlwind, and what her life has been like since she packed as much as she could into her Flagstaff bumper pull camper and moved from Baskin, Louisiana, to Nashville in 2011.

She doesn’t live in that RV anymore, but she remembers it well. “The camper wasn’t nothing special,” she says. “It was 20 feet long. It had a bed, a bathroom, and a microwave. It did have a little stove, but half the time the stove wouldn’t work. And my propane would run out. I’d take three showers and my propane would just be gone.” Meals were usually ramen noodles or a Slim Jim and a bag of chips.

“I think living in that camper taught me perseverance, if I didn’t already know it to begin with,” she adds. “It taught me that this was not gonna be easy, you know? But if you love it, you do it anyway.”

And persevere she did. It took a while, but after close to 10 years of honing her crafts as a songwriter and a singer, she landed a record deal with Broken Bow Records.

The love of country music started when she was very young, like it usually does. But for Wilson, what went hand in hand with that passion was also knowing what it looks like to work hard.

Growing up in a tiny town of 250 people, everybody knew everybody. Wilson describes her hometown as one full of farmers who worked hard and helped each other out. “Man, even at an early age, I noticed that everybody in my town worked really, really hard,” she says. “My daddy’s a farmer and farms corn, wheat, soybeans, and oats. I saw him get up every single day and do what he had to do for his family. I saw how he took himself out of it and was working hard for me, my sister, my mama, and our future families and the families after that. So that’s all I’ve ever known, to see people get up at the crack of dawn and bust their tail until midnight and go and do it again the next day.”

Day in and day out, what Wilson saw was an unwavering work ethic— and what she heard was country music. “Country music was just kind of the soundtrack of our lives,” she says. “I didn’t even realize that it was a genre. I just felt like I knew the people on the radio. I felt like I was friends with Randy Travis and Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. It was second nature for us.”

1/2

Also second nature for her? The PRCA. She and her sister had the honor of being official Rodeo Flag Girls for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. “I’d ride in with the American flag and sing the national anthem on horseback. That was a huge part of my childhood,” she remembers. “To this day, my daddy is still president of the rodeo club in Franklin Parish.”

Her front-row seat to that Louisiana life, she says, is what landed her where she is now. Wilson is the reigning Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year, the Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year, a Grammy winner, and — most recently — she was honored with the ACM’s Triple Crown and Milestone awards. Now, she could be on the verge of even more awards and accolades following Whirlwind.

But back to that little camper. After three years in her RV, with no sign of fame or fortune, Wilson still clung to the belief that she’d end up finding her way. “I didn’t know how it was gonna look, but I knew that I was gonna do it. It was just kind of mind over matter: become a better songwriter, become a better artist, become a better person.”

Initially, it was her family’s friend Jerry Cupit who helped Wilson dig deeper when it came to the nuances of country songwriting. “He’d say, ‘Alright, if it’s a blue truck, how fast does that blue truck go?’ And that made me think, Man, okay, well it’s not too farfetched for somebody like me to actually move to Nashville one day and do it.”

After her father taught 11-year-old Lainey a few chords on the guitar, writing songs became part of her. (Even if she had stayed in Baskin and become a teacher, she says she would have still come home from work every day and written songs.) “There was just no getting rid of it. I mean, I was still active in high school playing basketball, cheering, and doing all the other things that kids do. But songwriting was my number one,” she says. “I would still to this day consider myself a songwriter before I consider myself an artist.”

I just needed to have my fingerprints on everything that I put on this record. At a time of my life when it was changing very rapidly, writing songs for this record was what kept me holding on to who I am: a sister, a friend, a daughter.

She’s so committed to songwriting, in fact, that she co-wrote every single track on Whirlwind. As she did on her last album, Bell Bottom Country, and her full-length debut, Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’.

“I just needed to have my fingerprints on everything that I put on this record. At a time of my life when it was changing very rapidly, writing songs for this record was what kept me holding on to who I am: a sister, a friend, a daughter,” she explains. “Those are the things that make me feel like me, so that I can be Lainey the artist.”

And that may very well be why Wilson was recently invited to be part of the Grand Ole Opry. “That right there is the ultimate honor,” she says. “The Opry is where my dreams started. My parents took me when I was nine years old, and I’d always dreamed about being a part of the Opry family. When you think about everybody who has played the Opry and been a part of it just to celebrate country music, it’s overwhelming.”

Even with success swirling around her, Wilson tries to hang tight to her small-town tenets and make sure she’s finding some peace out there. She used to invite friends over for bonfires when she was home. But now that she spends most of her days and nights on the road, she recreates that vibe there. “We make sure we put our chairs together outside the tour bus, pour whiskey over Sonic ice, and hang out and talk,” she says. “It’s about finding that piece of home, wherever you are.”

There are bigger plans in the works for making Nashville feel more like home. Like building a barn and getting some horses of her own. “Anytime I go back home to Louisiana, the first thing we do is saddle up and go for trail rides, because that’s what me and my family did for fun,” Wilson says. “And if there’s ever an opportunity for me to go to somebody’s ranch, I make sure that I take advantage of that. Because that is where I feel at home — on the back of a horse with the wind blowing through my hair. ... That’s who I am to my core.”

The allure of home was never strong enough for Wilson to heed. “I should have thought about going home,” she says. “It wasn’t until year seven that I even got a publishing deal. But I was just crazy enough to think that if I had a meeting with somebody, and they listened to my music, in my heart I still felt like even if they passed on me, I would take that as: Alright, well we’re moving in the right direction. Maybe there’s something right around the corner.”

And now there is always something right around the corner for Wilson. First, with the release of Whirlwind, then with her 2024 tour — sharing new tunes with her steadily mounting fan base — and especially when she plays two nights in Monroe, Louisiana, just about 30 miles northwest of Baskin.

With songs like “Middle of It,” which Wilson told C&I is the most autobiographical song that she’s written, and ones like “Good Horses,” which she wrote and recorded with Miranda Lambert, this new album is more than a whirlwind. It’s a wild ride that won’t be reined in any time soon.

The Lambert collaboration is a culmination of years of friendship. Wilson recalls Lambert reaching out to her about three years ago, asking her: “How’s your heart? How’s your mind? How’s your life?”

“It felt good to have somebody that I knew could relate to some of my struggles,” Wilson says. “She’s kind of been my country-music big sister.”

Wilson credits Lambert with teaching her that it’s the right thing to do to advocate for other artists just getting started — especially the female artists. “I’m a part of blazing that trail right now, and it’s a big responsibility,” Wilson says. “It’s so crazy how we really have no choice but to do that for each other. And that’s a shame. It’s a shame because the boys ain’t gotta do that for each other. The trail has already been blazed. So they don’t have to keep going down and whacking those weeds. But for us, it seems like those weeds keep growing, and you gotta get back in there with a weed whacker and do some work.”

Another song from Whirlwind, “Whiskey Colored Crayon,” is Wilson’s tip of the hat to the sad story songs that made her fall in love with country music in the first place: “When you think of songs like ‘Whiskey Lullaby,’ ‘The Thunder Rolls,’ and ‘Goodbye Earl,’ that’s what I wanted to do.”

On all 14 tracks, Wilson says she found herself and found that being vulnerable is one of the best approaches to making music. “I think of this record as being grounding, centered, focused, and finding peace in the storm. And the storm is really just my life,” she says. “And it allowed me to show a side of me that maybe I didn’t even know I had myself.”

The Official Whirlwind Track List

Whirlwind, scheduled for release on August 23, is Lainey Wilson’s fifth studio album, featuring the following 14 tracks.

“Keep Up With Jones”
“Country’s Cool Again”
“Good Horses” (featuring Miranda Lambert)
“Broken Hearts Still Beat”
“Whirlwind”
“Call A Cowboy”
“Hang Tight Honey”
“Bar In Baton Rouge”
“Counting Chickens”
“4x4xU”
“Ring Finger”
“Middle Of It”
“Devil Don’t Go There”
“Whiskey Colored Crayon”

Visit laineywilson.com for music, tour dates, and more and check out Lainey Wilson’s Quick 6.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Erick Frost; Eric Ryan Anderson

From our October 2024 issue.