After slogging through poverty, indifference and Hannah Montana impersonations, the US singer is an award-winning sensation and selling out a UK tour. She explains why her genre is going mainstream like never before
You get the sense the country music establishment really had no choice but to embrace Lainey Wilson: that she wasn’t going anywhere until they did. When the singer-songwriter arrived in Nashville in 2011, she parked her 20-foot bumper pull trailer on a studio’s lawn and anchored it with rocks. Then 19, she had lived country music all her life. But Nashville is what they call a “10-year town”, rarely a place of instant hits and TikTok fame. Wilson had to do it the old-fashioned way: a decade of graft, rejection, false starts, handing out CDs in the streets, gigs, tours and playing to the same crowds over and over.
Gradually, things started to click (a publishing deal in 2017), then gather momentum (six No 1s on country radio since 2021), then snowball (a record-breaking nine nominations at the 2023 CMA awards, winning five), culminating in February when her 2022 album, Bell Bottom Country, won this year’s Grammy for country album of the year. Wilson is now one of the hottest properties in country music. An overnight sensation 11 years in the making, as she puts it. “It feels great,” says Wilson, 31, over video call, with her irresistible Louisiana twang, “because it makes me feel like maybe I wasn’t as crazy as a lot of people thought I was. Like, I told ya!”
