We all love Lainey! Rolling Stone does too!
Lainey Wilson slid into her first pair of bell bottoms when she was nine years old. They were blue leopard print, a gift from her mother, and a source of élan vital. “I remember as a little girl putting them on and feeling myself, like, ‘OK, I can do this,’” she says, “even if I was just performing in front of a mirror with a hairbrush.”
Cosied up by a fireplace on a scenic ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley of California’s Central Coast, about an hour north of Santa Barbara, the 32-year-old country singer-songwriter traced much of her present self to that watershed year. In 2001, she also wrote her first song, adopted her brown quarter horse, Tex, and went to Nashville for the first time, attending the famous live country music broadcast Grand Ole Opry. Sitting in the audience with her parents, Wilson absorbed every note of the night’s performers: pop-country deity Crystal Gayle, novelty jokester Little Jimmy Dickens, 90s hitmaker Phil Vassar and tender crooner Bill Anderson. “I just knew,” Wilson says, in her thick-as-molasses drawl, “that I was going to be able to play there one day.”
Twenty-three years later, the singer became the Opry’s 229th member. Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood — two country music icons whose songs soundtracked Wilson’s childhood — inducted her on 7 June 2024. This was on the heels of winning the prestigious Entertainer of the Year award at the Country Music Association’s annual ceremony in 2023. Wilson beat arena-filling artists Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs and became the first woman to win since Taylor Swift. The singer estimates that she played 186 shows in 2023 and spent very few nights sleeping in her own bed in Nashville. In this sense, she entertained more than any other person nominated. But most and best are two very different things.
“It was a little bit shocking,” she says of her big win that night at the CMAs. “But when they put that crown on your head, you ain’t gonna give it back.”
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